I am having trouble getting the trip rack to raise on my Vandercook 4. I removed the trip rack to access the cylinder eccentric adjustment today. I removed the rack while the carriage was in the middle of the bed. I put the rack back together afterwards and now the rack won’t fully raise when the roller at the bottom hits the trip wedge to send it up into print mode. I thought this was related to the tooth position of the gear and the rack, but based on the wear on the parts I’m pretty sure it’s going back together the same way it was. I cannot manually rotate the eccentric collar and carriage tie bar very much, as I saw recommended in a similar post from quite a while ago where Paul recommended using a pin wrench to manually rotate it. When I do this, I notice the carriage seems to move a small amount as though I were adjusting the eccentrics.
I wonder if the adjustments I made to the cylinder eccentrics are keeping the cylinder from dropping into print? As a side note, I had a hard time adjusting my cylinder. I used the feeler gauge and got everything feeling good in the middle of the bed, but there seems to be some wear closer to the feed board. I did the best I could but there is a slightly tight spot as the cylinder is maybe 6″ from the feed board. Is this an indication that it’s all too tight, and maybe causing my trip rack issue too? IMG_0742