Three Times the Charm

You could almost see the gears spinning in the little fellow’s head.

It was birthday No. 3 for Evan, the adorable-beyond-mortal-words son of friends Curt and Amanda Iseli, and he was taking it all very seriously. He called Shop Boy over and, as he perched on his pint-sized chair, feet on the seat, bottom on the arm, looked me square in the eye.

He wanted to know what Shop Boy thought about cake. Not the band. Everyone knows my weakness there too well. Evan had reached some existential passage in his young life and was apparently seeking a spiritual guide to get him through the portal to a deeper understanding of the chocolaty deliciousness.

And then he tipped over.

That quickly, a lesson in gravity superseded the quest for baked-goods enlightenment as Curt picked Evan up and dusted him off — no tears, the little dude playing it off like a 10-year-old or something, a swig of lemonade taking his mind off the whole incident. Meanwhile,  Shop Boy used the opportunity to grab a honking turkey burger from Curt’s grill. Thank goodness for vegetarians with absolutely no clue about meat portions. Yum.

Typecast had done the invite for the party for the third year in a row, with Amanda Iseli doing the extravagant design. She does great work for Baltimore magazine, but saves a little of the good stuff for Evan’s birthday parties. Boxes, seed packets, goodie bags, cards inside of cards. Wow. All we then have to do is figure out how to apply ink to all these weird things.

For No. 3, the main invite is cut from this crazy, thick cardboard stuff Mary bought in bulk — you think the turkey burgers were bigger than absolutely necessary? — the gargantuan, heavy pile of which we’ve been whittling away at. Anyway, a little blue ink on there with the right design and … it looks just like the printing on an egg carton. Fun!

Well, this year, Evan is apparently old enough that he got a vote on the card design. So the Iselis stopped by the Typecast Press studios, where, as Shop Boy fed menus to the big C&P, Evan became fixated on the machine’s old gears. And somehow, as the guy who made all those gears move at once, Shop Boy suddenly acquired rock star status. (It’s fleeting. They all grow up.)

I suppose it’d have been more stunning had the little boy not been mesmerized by the machine, as he’s third-generation gearhead. Hot rods, that is.

Mary: “What are those three big rusty motor things in the garage?”

Curt: “Oh! Those are [gearhead-speak] flathead motors that I picked up from a guy. I bought one, and ended up hauling all three back here. I hope to trade them for [gearhead-speak] and [gearhead-speak] with [gearhead-speak].”

Um-hmm.

Evan’s not quite there yet. His pick for the coolest car in the Typecast Press parking lot? Mary’s crummy, old, dented Volvo.

Shop Boy about fell over backwards.

Dark Matter

So all this time, the Hubble Space Telescope’s been pointed the wrong way.

All that money wasted searching the stars. Go figure.

See, if it had been pointed toward Earth instead of off into the heavens, aimed particularly at Baltimore and a funky little neighborhood called Hampden, then it probably would have picked up a black hole right in our own solar system. It was the one that Mary was staring through Shop Boy. And all because I told her she was perfect. Sheesh. What’s a guy gotta do?

As it turns out, a guy’s gotta be able to detect printing flaws so small that the units of measure that would describe them have not yet been named. Smidgen? Way too big. Skosh? Not even close. Sliver of a skosh? Nope. In honor of Mary, the only one who can see them, Shop Boy has made the executive decision to name these bedeviling levels of misalignment, these infinitesimally small blemishes himself: micro-Mashburns, or mMs.

The time element the micro-Mashburn represents is a much larger unit, say two hours per mM. And, of course, there’s a financial measurement that must be factored in. What the heck? Let’s say $100 an hour. Shop Boy’s buying.

Now say, for instance, you’ve got a holiday card that is designed to be folded, accordion style, into four panels. Proof after proof shows Shop Boy that the wording on the long card is perfectly, undeniably, dead-on straight. Mary, however, has detected a 3 mM swing from one end to the other. She’s absolutely, unswayably sure it’s there.

Well, for purposes of this blog, time will be represented by a “T” and financial implications by a “$.” The simple equation, then, looks something like this: mM x T = $.

You follow me? Good.

So, Shop Boy does the math and the answer is clear. It’s unnecessary — OK, I said “crazy,” sue me — to hold up production on something that we’ve nailed so thoroughly, unquestionably, perfectly and exactly.

Well, you know Shop Boy’s odds of winning this argument, right? Slim and mM.

Sure enough, we were still tinkering late into the evening. You can’t say that we at Typecast Press won’t kill ourselves to get the job done right.

Mary: “See? It looks much better now.”

Shop Boy: “I can’t see a difference. Maybe it’s because we’ve been standing over this thing for hours and hours trying to correct a problem that’s not there — what is this, Horton Hears a Who? — and my eyes are tired from counting all the money we’re throwing away while we’re fixing something that was already perfect in the first place.”

You should have seen the look she gave me.

Man, some folks just don’t appreciate good scientific logic.

Under the Knife, Under the Wire

As the ambulance pulled away, Mary let her mind drift to the worst-case scenario.

Our 12×18 C&P was a goner, and we’d have to find a new way to print just the type of job we’d acquired the machine to handle, a large, solid block of color. Like, pronto.

The patients in the back of the rescue vehicle — OK, it was a truck, but work with me here — were the C&P’s main shaft and attached cam and gear. The C&P had gone through a few cycles with such force and noise, we knew we had a problem. We’d trouble-shot as much as we could. Externally, the machine looked OK aside from a few large welds that suggested previous abuse. The problem had to be within the main shaft, but there was no way mere mortals — thank you, but Shop Boy is mere flesh and blood just like you — could get at it.

Shop Boy wrote a post on this turn of events a while back, but I realize that I never mentioned how one machine’s life was saved and by whom. I was still a bit shaken at the time. Typecast Press was facing nothing short of catastrophe: leaving a favorite client in the lurch.

We did what we always do in this situation. We called in a ringer … I mean rigger. Namely, one Bruce Baggan. Bruce owns North American Millwright Services Inc., a company that moves massive equipment from here to there. No mess, no fuss. It was here, now it’s there. Mary can’t watch sometimes, but she’s missing quite a show.

We first met Bruce at his warehouse. I think he wanted to chat with us because he wondered if we could possibly be serious: “You want to move what? What the heck do you want that for? I’ve been scrapping those for years.”

Presses. He was scrapping old presses. He clearly had not seen what some of these babies were going for on eBay. At one point, Mary asked whether he’d come across any available Miehle Verticals … 3-ton presses.

“I’ve got one out in the dumpster,” Bruce said. “You can have it if you like.”

It was upside-down and in pieces, alas. Not that Mary wasn’t tempted.

Bruce, an old letterpress guy himself — and by “old” I mean that he ran a press in high school and as a college job, not to suggest in any way that he couldn’t still inflict pain upon anyone who’d suggest he ain’t 25 anymore — has become Typecast Press’ indispensable scout and friend. He’s still amazed that folks want this outmoded stuff. But he’s also really pleased. He’s always hated dumping the dinosaurs but had no clue there was a letterpress subculture out there. Bruce handled the heavy lifting in moving the 12×18 C&P into our shop, taking a break from surgery/rehab for a torn bicep!!! Mary calls him Santa Claus.

Who else would we call now?

He’d run these machines. He knew guys who’d run these machines. Did Bruce know anyone who could take one apart and, we prayed, fix it?

Natch.

Enter Al, one of Bruce’s key guys at North American Millwrights. He came, he saw, he puzzled. He was up for it. Hadn’t seen one of these in a while. But Al’s been inside the guts of so many distressed machines that he’s apparently one of those people who can simply listen and it tells him what ails it. Yes, the machine was fighting itself. The main shaft and cam gear needed to come off. In essence, the machine needed to be stripped. Is that all? Bruce’s son Chris showed up to dead lift the heaviest pieces out, and off they went.

After they had gone, we looked over the skeleton of the C&P. The flywheel and gear shaft had hidden another huge weld on the cast-iron frame. Truly, this thing had to have been dropped out a window at some point. Jeez. We also looked at the calendar, talking over scenarios. We had no choice but to wait.

And sweat.

Until one day, Mary called Shop Boy at work in D.C.

“You won’t believe it. It works,” she said. “Not only did it get operated on at the hospital, but now it’s getting its teeth flossed!”

OK, she was giddy. But Al and Eugene, a machinist from North American who had performed some of the surgery on the C&P’s bits, were indeed “flossing” the gear teeth. Oh, the new shaft sparkled. And when Mary mentioned that the C&P throw-off lever — which controls which mode the machine is in — was nearly impossible to move, Al unstuck it.

Well, to make a long story just a little bit longer, Typecast Press made the deadline, the client was pleased, and Shop Boy slept easier that night.

Mary? She stayed up late trying to craft a proper thank-you for the new toy that Santa Claus had brought.

Letterpress List No. 9: Getting Ink Done

Shop Boy should have it tattooed on his forehead: Think Before You Ink!

There we were again late last night, trying to clear black ink off the big C&P. Mary and Shop Boy. A two-person bucket brigade. Be glad you weren’t there. Shop Boy sure wished he wasn’t.

Typecast Press was doing a run of menus for a new Baltimore restaurant, Woodberry Kitchen. The chef/owner, Spike Gjerde, is doing the whole sustainable-resources thing … local veggies and meats produced in an environmentally responsible manner. WK’s in this great area, Clipper Mill, that literally rose from the ashes. The restaurant’s filled with great old details — machine parts and the like — and has a cool bar and a balcony for more private (or illicit … just saying) dining. With Spike, the food’s always great. We’ve torn through the rockfish, the pork, shrimp. And we may never go to another movie without stopping by for the buttered/sea salted popcorn. (Shop Boy’s not above begging for a to-go bag.)

OK, Shop Boy’s channeling Mary’s mom, who once got so carried away over the food that she yelled to the waiters at a French-only cafe in Quebec: “Tell the chef … Yummy! Yummy! Yummy!“

So back to our regularly scheduled program. (Spike’s paying us for the menus, not a plug. Besides, this is about Shop Boy.)

Anyhow, Mary designed the Woodberry Kitchen logo with large wood type, then we scanned it and had polymer plates made so we can change the logo’s size. Spike insisted on using a song lyric from the late Joe Strummer (of the Clash and the Mescaleros fame) on the menu: “If you’re after getting the honey/ Then you don’t go killing all the bees.”

Nice.

We were using soy ink, which is said to be better for the environment but is funky under the best conditions. It’s absolute poison in Shop Boy’s hands.

“Really, Mary, it was so little ink.”

She was unconvinced.

“Look, Shop Boy, we’ve been through this. If you see that it’s printing too heavy, don’t just hope it corrects itself. Do something.”

See, here’s where Mary and Shop Boy differ: She’s such a perfectionist that she looks for reasons to stop the press and tweak. Shop Boy looks for reasons to keep it churning. Simple denial will do in a pinch. “This one might be garbage, but the next impression will be the magic. I just know it.” You can run through a lot of paper in the printshop this way. Or in Las Vegas, come to think of it.

So there were Joe Strummer’s words … somewhere under all the black goop. And there we were stripping ink off the press. Now, Shop Boy can laugh at his goof-ups later, but it’s really embarrassing to have to ask Mary to bail me out when I’m up to my knees in black soy ink — enough to kill all the bees in Maryland — after she’d just told me I should be subtle when reapplying it. And saying, “Well, you shouldn’t have left the room,” doesn’t really cut it at that point.

Sigh. Shop Boy stewed as he ran off an extra 350 or so fresh menus.

“That’s enough, Shop Boy,” Mary said finally.

“You mean stop printing them?” Shop Boy asked glumly.

“No, I mean knock it off.”

Sniff … she always knows just what to say.

****

OK, time for about an hour of shop-approved music. But first, about two minutes of preaching:

Maryland and the Washington, D.C., metro area have a tremendous problem with aggressive driving, dangerous antisocial behavior. People die. Your metro area likely has the same woe. So police, in cars and helicopters, using satellite imaging and radar, have begun to crack down, they say, on the reckless weaving, dodging and speeding that many folks favor on their commutes.

Dr. P.M. Forni of the Johns Hopkins Civility Project here in Baltimore found that Americans consider aggressive driving the second-rudest thing someone can do. Discrimination was the only thing more rude. Yikes.

But now hear this from a TV ad: In the new class of Mercedes Benz, the handling stiffens automatically to help stabilize the vehicle during aggressive driving. Oh, and it’s fast enough for the Autobahn. “Why? Because we promised you a Mercedes Benz.”

Holy cow. Maybe the cops should attack aggressive driving at its source. First bust is a Benzie exec.

End of sermon.

****
Letterpress List No. 9: Songs to “Drive Gently” By

If you slow down a bit, you’ll get to hear more of these songs on your way to work. Not all of them promote safe driving, so follow close to your heart, not the bumper of the car in front of you. (“OK, knock it off, Shop Boy.”) If you don’t own these songs, why not? Check for them on iTunes and Napster.

Dirt Track Date — Southern Culture on the Skids (Got a designated driver?)
Money Ain’t a Thang — Jermaine Dupri/Jay-Z (Great song, bad driving.)
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road — Lucinda Williams (Painting a picture you can feel.)
Long Walk Back to San Antone — Junior Brown (Taken for a ride.)
Tonight Is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel — Barenaked Ladies (The last thing on his mind or the furthest thing from his mind? Hmm.)
Uneasy Rider — Charlie Daniels Band (Hippie. Mississippi. Flat tire. Bad news.)
Runnin’ Down a Dream — Tom Petty (This’ll blow back your hair with the windows closed.)
Little Deuce Coupe — Beach Boys (Not being from California, Shop Boy once thought the “pink slip” gave him more time to drive his favorite car because he was fired from work. It’s the deed! Duh.)
Heading Out to the Highway — Judas Priest (Nothing to lose.)
One Headlight — the Wallflowers (An order of melancholy. Put wheels on it.)
Panama — Van Halen (Pistons poppin’, ain’t no stopping nnnnnnnnoooooooowwwwwwwwww!)
Rollin’ — Limp Bizkit (Back up!)
Drive Away — Halfcocked (Fuzzy dice sway to the time you’re making.)
Satan Is My Motor — Cake (Maybe that’s the problem.)
Maybelline — Chuck Berry (Honk if you love rock and roll.)

And just to wish Spike and Amy Gjerde and Nelson Carey a smooth stretch of highway as they begin their new venture:
Johnny Appleseed — Joe Strummer

Give Me a Brake

It had to stop.

Mary and Shop Boy were having a little misunderstanding — not really a fight as much as a failure to realize that she was right. In plain English, Mary was spelling out the need for an emergency brake on the ancient 12×18 C&P letterpress we were very close to bringing online. Shop Boy? Speaking French again.

You know: The French believe plumbers plumb, painters paint, machinists machine. It’s Shop Boy’s operating system, translated further into: Don’t know it? Fear it. Mock it. Get away from it: “Why do we need an emergency brake? I can stop the wheel very easily by hand. It’s one more thing that can go wrong.”

Well, let’s just say Mary’s operating system is a little more powerful: “What if your hand is stuck in it? How will you stop the wheel from crushing it to a pulp?”

OK, we could have the brake. But there were issues. For instance, the floor of the studio is concrete covered with tile, so the brake would need to be mounted on plywood that was then glued rather than screwed into place. Fine. The spring mechanism that once kept the brake pad an inch or so from the wheel had long ago failed, meaning the brake had become a permanent drag on the wheel. The part of the brake that actually touched the drive wheel featured a dirty old asbestos pad. It got gunk all over the wheel — meaning hand-washing every five seconds — and put carcinogens into the atmosphere. To fix that, Mary presented Shop Boy with a square of material that was rubber on one side and cloth on the other. This would at least keep the constant rubbing from releasing toxins. Great. She ran an errand and Shop Boy went to work, cutting the square to the proper size and gluing the cloth side to the asbestos brake shoe. A little elbow grease cleaned the years of gunk off the wheel and I was set to try it out.

The motor had been placed by the flywheel to power a friction drive roller — a yellow rubber/plastic composite thingy that in turn spins the wheel. You don’t need a belt mechanism. It’s very cool.

Unless your new rubber brake pad, rather than gently rub the wheel, stops it dead and the drive roller, still spinning like mad, starts throwing chunks of itself across the floor.

By the time Shop Boy could react, the roller had lost enough flesh — like bits of pencil eraser — that it no longer made contact with the wheel. No contact, no motion. F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-, um, Phooey! Now I’d have to re-mount the motor, which I never would have had to do if there was no brake, which we didn’t even need, and how am I supposed to know how to mount a motor? And Mary’ll be back soon and I’ve just ruined the press and we’ve got a job we need to run tonight and I hate letterpress anyway and I’m stupid and ugly and fat and should never have been allowed to grow up and …

You get the picture. Chunks of the drive roller and Shop Boy’s psyche commingled in grease and oil beneath the C&P.

Mary called to ask how it was going.

“You don’t want to know.”

But by then I’d somehow — Shop Boy now officially believes in miracles — tended to the motor and got the slimmed-down drive roller to spin the big wheel again. My psyche wasn’t as easy to put back together.

“Why didn’t you just ask me?” Mary said. “Of course the rubber stopped the wheel too fast. I would have told you to put the cloth side up on the brake pad.”

Of course, this made me feel waaaay better.

We decided it might be best to rig up a temporary system that prevented the brake pad from touching the wheel, but could be used in an emergency. We wedged a collapsible cardboard box beneath the brake lever. Simply stepping on the lever would crush the box and brake the wheel (and damage the roller, but an emergency’s an emergency). And we cut and attached a new brake pad, cloth side up.

OK, so I went to wash my hands. Two minutes later, I returned to find a concerned Mary turning the machine on and off. The wheel wouldn’t turn. She’d accidentally kicked the box out from under the brake lever, the cloth had stopped the wheel as efficiently as the rubber and … well, you know.

Phooey.

Mary: “Maybe we should just get rid of the stupid brake.”

Of course, she was right.

At Arm’s Length

It’s happened to me more times than most pressmen can count on one hand: five.

During a run, the paper jumps the guides on the tympan sheet, dropping toward the greasy guts of the C&P, and the first instinct is to reach in, grab it and reposition it before the press closes. Success means:

1. The paper doesn’t become garbage (key if you’ve cut it way too close on the paper order).

2. The tympan — which holds the guides and any packing on the platen — doesn’t get inked (and thus print a ghost image on the back of the next 25 copies).

3. You get to keep all your fingers.

Failure is messy. Kind of like for the golfer who, instead of taking a penalty stroke and a $4 hit, decides he can beat the alligator to the ball.

So far I’ve been lucky. But somehow I’ve got to shut off the reflex. It’ll take work, since it’s been with me a while. During college, I worked a few semesters in a dining hall at the University of Rhode Island. One day, I dropped a ladle into a screaming hot cauldron of spaghetti sauce. Zip! My arm went in after it. Let me tell you … no, let’s not summon the sense memory. But know this: The stain was still on the 25-foot-high ceiling when I graduated a few years later. The ladle was uninjured, by the way.

Mary has been helpful in my retraining on the C&P, promising to put my head in the press the next time I try my little trick. And it’s illuminating to meet printers in Baltimore and beyond who know firsthand how quickly you can lose a digit. One guy who saw the tips of several fingers get mashed to a pulp in a paper cutter says his colleagues welcomed him back from the hospital with congratulations: He was officially a printer now.

High-fours all around.

Platen Pending

So you’ve got a Chandler & Price 8×12 dating from the early 1900s. The platen, that which determines all when it comes to evenness of impression, is off. Considerably. All right, it’s almost sideways. Would you:
A. Use tons of make-ready to compensate for the uneven die-on-paper contact on all projects for the rest of your life?
B. Concentrate all your projects on the tiny spot on the platen you think is the most “true”?
C. Not sweat it: The charm of letterpress is that it allows for a little unevenness and the client probably won’t notice?
D. Use a different machine, as your shop assistant suggests — OK, pleads?
E. Tell your assistant to stop whining and to grab the wrenches?

If you answered E, welcome to my world.

Word has it that many pressmen, even old-time sticklers, don’t mess with the platen. Haven’t touched it in years, or ever. Can’t say that I blame them. It took Mary and me six months (!) to adjust the platen on our C&P: five months and 29 days just to work up the courage (mine) to try. Our little Bible of Letterpress didn’t help much, advising: “Ask your instructor.” Good enough for me. Let sleeping dogs lie, and all that.

See, in my book, the French have it right. Plumbers plumb. Sailors sail. Electricians electrify. Platen adjusters adjust platens. It’s all very democratic. I’ve pondered legally changing my name to Etienne, in fact. Do it yourself? Hah. Do that YOUR-self. I’ll just end up breaking it, or it’ll break me.

Well, Mary’s not French. And she’s not much into democracy either, at least in her printshop. So, I’m on my knees, a wrench in each hand, another tucked in my apron. My left arm reaches through the spokes of the drive wheel. (Machine unplugged? Check.) The right arm goes through the leather belt. (Check again.) I’m kissing metal and getting grease in my hair while trying to remember what’s clockwise when you’re upside-down. Bitter, bitter bile …

I stagger to my feet to find that, after all the twisting and cursing, adjusting the top-side’s not so bad. We test the impression. Nuts! Still off. Back under the press. Half turn, quarter turn, test. Ugh! Quarter turn, test. Half a quarter turn. Bingo.

“See? That wasn’t so hard,” Mary chirps. “We’ll just back it off a bit when we do coasters tomorrow.”

Pardon my French …