Thanks, all. I am half way through “General Printing”. Excellent. I will check out Fiveroses.

I finally got around to adjusting the form rollers and found out they would not adjust, even though all cleaned and greased. The reason:I had adjusted the bearings incorrectly. It seems the clearances were correct but that the carriage was tilted. This caused: 1. the horizontal beams that carry the rollers to be tilted 2. the rollers to be at different nominal heights from the bed 3. the roller adjustment screws, which have fairly close tolerance shanks, to bind up when trying to compensate for the height difference between the rollers. Re-adjusting the bearings with all the rollers in position made the job go well and, now, all is working smoothly.

I have printed a 4-color card consisting of three engravings and some small text. It is almost nothing but mistakes, but I don’t really know what’s wrong. Probably roller adjustment, inking, impression and paper! Only the registration was “perfect.” I had adjusted the rollers to get an ink band “about the width of a nickel,” as I have been told to do. This translates to rollers being only a thou or two below type. Does this seem right? I think the impression was too much. Under the loup it looks like there is a dark and not crisp band of ink around the text faces while the centers of the thicks are light or white. I interpret this as ink being squeezed out from between the type and the paper. What do you think? Probably can’t tell without seeing it. It might be over-inked in addition.

Try try again.

With the same settings, but different ink application, I printed an engraving with large black areas and found that the image improved if I took the impression slowly. Is this a sign of something? Should dwell time make much difference?

My ink plate is heated to about 75 degress with a heating pad under it. The “print shop” ambient is about 65. Van Son black for type and Daniel Smith colors for cuts.Oil-based. Stonehenge Rising paper.

You are correct about the arrangement of packing materials. “Draw” merely refers to it being clamped against the gripper bar and stretched over the packing because its tail is wound around the reel rod.

General Printing is arguably the best primer and has recently been reissued. For other titles David Rose has an annotated bibliography on his website “Fiveroses.org”:http://fiveroses.org.
Vandercook specific articles can be found on the present site’s “Bibliography”:http://vandercookpress.info/bib.html page.

Being in the Seattle area you have the good fortune to be in a community with several accomplished printers, the “Book Arts Guild”:http://bookartsguild.org/ and the “School of Visual Concepts”:http://www.svcseattle.com/

Go make those glorious mistakes!

Proof presses used in newspapers were often pressed into service to furnish advertisers with “tear” sheets to have on hand in their store to show customers, especially for sale items. So 25 or 50 sheets could be run quickly for that purpose so the advertiser would have them on hand before the newspaper was delivered. And often more than one or two proofs were required for editorial usage.

I’d suggest using only cold rolled steel for underpacking–regular galvanized sheet metal is very irregular and not at all precise. Finding someone to roll it may be a trick, but larger sheet metal shops should be able to do it.

Read everything you can lay your hands on–from the basic texts to stuff posted on the internet. Better yet, find someone who knows their stuff and would be willing to work with you, maybe someone in your area. The Vandercook is excellent for limited edition prints, and a platen doesn’t cut it for larger solids. And experiment–nothing is as good a teacher as making mistakes and figuring out the right answer.

Thanks, Paul. That gives me a good starting point. I will probably order some Kimlon to experiment with and certainly some tympan material (does the kimlon go against the cylinder?). In the meantime, some guesses about how this works…
-I am guessing that the 3 .016 packing sheets are a very dense and hard finished sheet which goes against the cylinder.
-On top of them is the “draw sheet”? “Draw” referring depth of impressing controlled by the hard/softness of this sheet?
-Then comes “non-slip” sheets which adjust the impression and for the thickness of the stock as needed?
-Both tympans are outermost and only the outer one is clamped up?

I just finished installing my home-made feed table and, so, am ready to start printing a catalog of the numerous galleys miscellaneous type and ornaments I got with the press. It will give me a little practice and a chance to find out if my rollers will work with the damage they have sustained. Also I am very excited to see how well I can control the registration, which I understand will be much more difficult than on a platen press.

I should ask if there are any tricks for repairing small dents in rollers. This pair is brand new, judging from the total lack of any ink anywhere on them. They just have been laid on the rubber and taken a set in two locations about .25″ in diameter. What a shame!

I am very appreciative of this blog’s willingness to share with this interested novice. So many questions. Can anyone recommend readings that would help me avoid asking so much? I have been so busy getting the press up I haven’t stopped to do research. Thanks to all.

My No. 4T has a .070″ undercut for which I typically use three .016″ packing sheets, two tympan sheets and a drawsheet cut from a .006″ roll as a starting point. Thus .048 + .018 = .066. I will add .002″ or .003″ non-slip sheets as needed depending on the paperstock. I change the tympan and drawsheet with nearly ever job.

Another option to bulk up a cylinder is to use Kimlon, a rubber-saturated high-bulk press packing paper (.021″). Designed to reduce packing changes, it is compressible and resilient. In other words, it doesn’t retain most impression on it’s surface.

I have stumbled across an older post about a press with a large undercut. One of the solutions was to have a plate rolled to make up the difference. Does a lesser, .070 undercut, such as my press has, need this kind of treatment?

Oh! There is also a big difference between a repro proof and a throwaway!

Daniel Morris
The Arm Letterpress
Brooklyn, NY

Russ,
The Heidelberg and Miehle Vertical are both cylinder presses and do top quality work just as your Vandercook can. Vandercooks were proofing machines and were meant for making prints of the highest quality in limited numbers.

Daniel Morris
The Arm Letterpress
Brooklyn, NY

I remain curious why Vandercook emphasized proof rates. It does not seem particularly important.

I have gotten the message on the LETPRESS, that “real” printing is done on a Heidelburg or Miele or big C&P. Certainly not on a Vandercook, and I think I understand why that is. But, from my very limited experience, I have to wonder how a 100 or 200 sq. in. linocut with lots of black will print on a 12 x 15 platen press. If Vandys have a forte, is it the ability to deliver high pressures without being the size of a steam engine (and cheap for being simple?). Putting a curved surface to a plane of type does not seem to be a good idea, unless, perhaps, the type is very large. Is that the whole deal? Or is there no reason at all to print on a Vandy, other than for the pleasure of trying (but failing) to coax a nice print out of a machine that was designed to produce throw-a-ways?

I’m not trying to pick a fight, I just want to know what you think.

Russ

It is more like you surmise in terms of production. I doubt it would have occurred to anyone technical trained in the printing trades to use a Vandercook for editioning, since that was not the purpose of the press, nor could it compete against presses that were designed for this purpose. There is very little bibliographic evidence of such at any rate (prior to the 1960s and the development of studio-letterpress).

Gerald

Thanks very much for the comment on type high. I had not tumbled to the fact that raising the type above type high would cause a mismatch between the circumference of the bearer and the effective circumference of the printing surface. As you suggest, if the type were higher than the rail, the cylinder bearers would have a larger circumference than the “effective” circumference of the type causing the carriage to move down the bed at a faster pace than the “type circumference” could keep up with. The sheet would have to skid across the type to keep up!

What I see as my problem is to figure out how to pack behind the tympan to make up for the 0.070 undercut without making the packing too springy or mushy. Right now I am thinking I might try to get a sheet of .030 steel rolled to fit the cylinder and then pack the remaining .040 normally. Do you think I need to go to such extremes to get a good print?

On a different topic:
Some of the Vandys advertise their “high” production rates. The 317, for instance, is like my 315 in that it has two trip ramps so you don’t have to roll all the way to the end of the bed to get a trip on the return. Also, having played with the “gravity underfeed” of the 315, I find that to be a feature probably intended to enhance rate. The traveling trays also seem production related. What I am working on is my lack of understanding of how a “proof press” was actually used. I would have expected that one or two proofs of a page might be pulled for the editors/compositors and then the form would be removed and replaced with a new one so a couple of more proofs could be pulled. That doesn’t seem like the “production” mode they advertise, because changing the forms will take a lot more time than running two or three proofs. Obviously, I am assuming that the actual production printing is done on a different press, since a Vandy seems much to slow…

Thanks again for your comments.

Yeah, they did stone proofs at the Russian daily where I worked, but didn’t use a proofing planer. They dampened the newsprint with a sponge, laid it on the page-form, then rolled an old composition roller over it. It was just legible enough for the two proof-readers. Galley proofs were done on a Challenge rolling-pin press. No Vandercook needed.
I have the 325H with grippers that can open manually (pedally, rather) or automatically; galley height bed; prints a 24″-square form. It did come from a newspaper originally.