Job 01The room4 sections7 min

Getting a second-hand proof press into a courtyard room

The press spent twenty years under a tarpaulin in a garage on the edge of the city, and the man selling it wanted it gone by the weekend. Getting it four hundred metres into the old town, through an arch and onto a floor that turned out to slope, took two days, six people and more optimism than any of us had a right to.

First pull: 18 April 2024
Last revised: 2 June 2024
Room: Vilnius, Lithuania

Finding a room that would take it

I looked at rooms for most of a year before this one. The requirements were short and they eliminated almost everything: a ground floor or a very serious staircase, a door wide enough for a machine that does not come apart, and a landlord willing to write cast iron into a lease. Old-town courtyards are full of small rooms behind arches, and nearly all of them are reached by a turn so tight that nothing longer than a bicycle gets round it. Three times I measured a doorway, went away pleased, and then remembered the corner beyond it.

What I took in the end is a back room with a stone floor, one window facing north into the courtyard, and a ceiling low enough that I can touch the beams. It is cold, which I knew, and damp from September onwards, which I had been told and did not believe. The advantage is that nothing underneath me can be damaged by weight or by a dropped quoin, and the neighbours above hear the press as a dull knock rather than as something to complain about. That second point has mattered more than the first.

Two days, six people and one arch

The press came apart into three pieces, which is two fewer than I had hoped. The bed and frame stayed as one lump on a pallet, the cylinder came off, and the feed board and stand were straightforward. A van brought it to the street entrance on a Saturday morning, and from there it went on a pallet truck across cobbles that are beautiful and completely unsuited to small hard wheels. We laid a path of scaffold boards, moved it a board at a time, and lifted the truck over the raised lip under the arch with four people on bars.

It nearly went over once, about a metre inside the courtyard, when a board shifted on an uneven stone and the whole thing leaned perhaps fifteen degrees. Nobody was underneath it, which was luck rather than planning, and afterwards we roped the frame to two ring bolts in the wall before moving anything else. If I ever do this again I will hire people who do it for a living. Six friends with a good breakfast in them are enthusiastic, strong and entirely without a plan for the second when something starts to move.

From the make-ready sheet

Measure the corner beyond the doorway, not the doorway
Scaffold boards over cobbles; small hard wheels sink
Rope the frame to something fixed before anyone rests
Nobody stands downhill of half a tonne on wheels

Levelling on a floor that is not level

A stone floor laid before anybody cared about spirit levels drops about eleven millimetres across the width of the press. Cast iron does not mind being tilted, but a cylinder rolling down a slope carries its own weight into the impression at one end and lifts off at the other. The first proof I pulled printed heavy on the left and vanished on the right, and for an afternoon I believed I had bought a press with a worn bed. The bed was fine. The floor was the problem, and the floor is not going to change.

Shimming took a weekend and a box of hardwood offcuts planed down in eighths of a millimetre. I worked from a long level laid on the bed rails rather than on the frame, checked it in four directions, and then left it a fortnight and checked again, because a wooden shim on stone settles. The press now sits within a hair of true and has not moved since. I wrote the shim thicknesses on the underside of the stand in pencil, which is the single most useful thing I did that spring.

January, and the hour before work

From the middle of December to the end of February the room sits at five or six degrees unless I do something about it. Ink at that temperature is a solid: it will not take off the knife cleanly, the rollers skid instead of turning, and an impression that looks right on the proof comes out patchy by the fourth sheet. An oil-filled heater on a timer brings the room to about sixteen degrees in ninety minutes, which is why nothing in here ever starts at the moment I arrive.

Warming a cold room too fast has its own cost. Cast iron holds the night temperature for hours after the air has come up, and moisture condenses on the bed and the rails exactly where I least want it. Twice in that first winter I found a bloom of orange on the bed in the morning. What works is heating gently, leaving a fan moving air along the machine, and wiping the bed with a thin oiled rag before I leave rather than after I arrive. Rust is patient and I am not.

From the make-ready sheet

Heater on a timer, ninety minutes before the first sheet
Ink and rollers want sixteen degrees, not five
Warm the air slowly or the bed sweats
Oiled rag on the bed when you leave, not when you arrive