Hello all,
My Sp15 has been put through her paces in the last two days, and tonight during cleanup I noticed that the ink drum is wobbling…or more precisely, the three screws that hold the pulley gear to the ink drum are wonky. The head to one screw is sheared off (and thus the source of the wobbling, I think), and the other two have loosened enough to be rubbing against the retaining block (that holds the ink drum to the body of the press).
The manual is light on disassembly instructions, and the parts are hard to make out in the fuzzy photos. Of course, I’m on a killer deadline this week, but can anyone offer suggestions?
Thanks!
Kelly
(edited to add: I’ve just gone searching through the archives, and found this post. It’s not exactly the same problem, but perhaps I’ll give Fritz a call in the morning.)
Kelly sent me some pictures and what she has is a replacement pulley and drive belt that are not original Vandercook but more of a v belt and modified pulley where the bolts holding the pulley to the ink drum had to be filed about 1/3 of the way through to clear the drive belt. One of these weakened bolts sheared causing her problem. When she has time, we’ll fix her up with the right parts. It is interesting to see how someone, working in a vacuum of no Vandercook information, solved their problem. The Vanderblog and internet access is bringing many people to the right information.
The disassembly is pretty straight forward. Fritz has supplied us with replacement gears for this and his are metal instead of the plastic ones I have found as original on SP-15s.
You should probably replace the belt and do a bunch of cleaning while you’ve got that drum out.
And top up the oil in the motor gearbox.
Daniel Morris
The Arm Letterpress
Brooklyn, NY