Maybe five years ago we bought our Vandercook SP-15 off eBay. When it got here the one major problem was that the ink drum was quite scratched from the automatic cleaning bar that scraped the ink off it. Lately we’ve been having trouble printing evenly with it and started to deduce that it might be [...]

As we did this on our Vandercook Universal III, we hoped some of you might be interested. leadgraffiti.com/news/tour-de-lead-graffiti . . . We would love for everyone to take a look at our effort in ‘endurance letterpress’ we called Tour de Lead Graffiti. We wanted to do a series of typographic posters that took the memorable [...]

First, I’m looking for someone in the general vicinity of Delaware that can troubleshoot and possibly repair an automatic Vandercook Universal III. Know anyone? If not, is there some kind of electrician I might try contacting. Obviously, I need more than someone to hook up a 3-phase here. We were running our III the other [...]

I’m using Firefox on a Macintosh. If I start a post I get a small window (four lines tall) which doesn’t appear to have any adustment as to its size. If while I’m still looking at a blank post I simply click ‘publish’ and then after things settle down, click ‘edit’ I get a larger [...]

We were printing a wedding invitation on Somerset paper on a Vandercook Universal III. The invitation is 22″ wide and has the deckle at both ends. The only thing I did special to start was that I added a second paper registration down the long edge of the paper to make sure it was fed [...]

I’m wondering if the following sequence of events seems unreasonable to get a very, very clean print on a Universal III. The project is an important certificate for a major university signed by the president and all. This is essentially for the text part of the certificate, not including the recipient’s name. Printing area is [...]

I think this one set a new Vandercook record. $10,100.53 Looks like a nice press. I’d love to have that adjustable bed.

The top sheet that we have on our Vandercooks is 7 mill mylar. I notice that Talas has rolls of both the 7 mill and 10 mill mylar. Although I don’t see any impact on printing quality the 7 mill will show indents when we’ve run a particularly large edition. I was wondering if anyone [...]

Yesterday morning we had a rather strange experience with our Vandercook SP-15. It was about noon and the studio was just starting to warm up. Temperature was maybe 50 degrees when we started the heater. After a bit we inked the press to print some notecards and what I think was the vibrator roller (pretty [...]

Does anyone have a working forward / backward switches for a Universal III they would be willing to sell? I also need the microswitch that is on the lower backside of the press closest to the feedboard, but this doesn’t seem quite as critical. Any help would be appreciated. Ray Nichols / Lead Graffiti

I need to remove the motor that drives the cylinder on a Vandercook Universal III. I need to have the motor rebuilt. I worked on it a bit today and simply could not figure out how to get it off nor could I figure out how much of I should take to the motor place [...]

I would like to see a chart of the dimensions of rollers for all of the Vandercook models somewhere that was easy to look up to see if your current rollers were up to par. I’ve just had a problem with my SP-15 rollers which were about 3/32″ too small in diameter and it was [...]