Build a Printmaking Press!
Introduction: Build a Printmaking Press!
Have you ever wanted to get a press for making block prints, searched online, saw the multi thousand dollar price tag and dejectedly said: "dang nevermind"? This is exactly what went through my mind as I looked for presses online. I make a decent amount of prints, enough that I realized I was spending so many hours pressing our prints by hand, and because I'm pretty busy these days, I'd like to recover as much of that time as possible. So I took matters into my own hands and put that [almost] engineering degree to use building the machine I need to take this to the next level.
If you aren't familiar, in relief printmaking, you place paper over a block which has been carved like a stamp and then rolled with ink. By either pressing on the paper with an object like a spoon or baren, the design is stamped onto the paper. A press allows me to roll the paper and block under high pressure, essentially doing this job for me more consistently and much quicker, as well as using less forearm effort.
This press is sturdy enough for linocuts, but since I do not do etchings and other kinds of printmaking, I'm not sure how it would do with jobs requiring higher pressure. For this reason, I hesitate to call it an etching press. Nonetheless, it does what I need easily and up to standards so I'm very happy with how it came out.
Even if you don't plan to build a press, maybe there's a neat trick or two you can take from this to implement on your next project!
So let's go build this thing!
Step 1: Design Considerations
To start, I went online to look for inspiration for this project. Initially I purchased a set of plans from https://buildapress.com/ which had many helpful ideas. You would certainly benefit to get those plans if you are thinking about building a press. Ultimately though, I ended up doing a different design I created after looking at the showcase of presses that people had built on that same website. This new design uses lightweight parts that are easier to manufacture by hand, and makes several replacements in design and materials in places where I do not need as much strength for my applications. Specifically, this design is based off images of a press model by <PERSON>: https://buildapress.com/images/show/David%20Cambridge/David%20Cambridge-2016-bench.html
Step 2: Functionality
Here's a quick and dirty primer on how the press works:
1. A sandwich is formed between the upper and lower roller, consisting of the paper, the ink, the linoleum printing plate, and the bed (see image)
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Turning the handle drives the bottom roller, advancing the bed forward
3. If the top roller is low enough down, the sandwich will be under pressure as it passes through the rollers
4. This pressure is what forces the ink to adhere to the paper, making your print
Step 3: Assemble Drawings
I modeled all parts for this design in Solidworks, which is a kind of CAD or Computer Aided Design software used often by engineers. I decided to make the press bed 19" wide and 4 feet long to handle even fairly large prints. This software allows me to create 3d models of each part needed, assemble them into a final "assembly", and then create a packet of engineering drawings. Each drawing shows the part from several views, and all the useful dimensions labeled
These drawings will be key to let me machine all the parts I need, so it's worth spending a lot of time making sure they are well made and accurate.
Step 4: Materials
This press is mainly built of aluminum and steel, held together with hex bolts and nuts. I avoided glue as to make it possible to disassemble, flatpack, and transport because I move around a lot. In total, everything I needed (including a lot of new tools I had to buy) cost a bit over $600. That sounds like a lot (and it is) but it is significantly less than the prebuilt presses I found online ($1700 to $4000). Obviously there is also the cost of my time to consider, but I was on vacation anyways and decided to spend much of it doing this. The goal is that this machine will pay for itself as I'm able to work faster and produce higher volumes.
You can buy all these metal parts at Metals Depot online or Coremark Metals online. Both will let you specify to cut the parts to the length you need (which is totally worth the time and labor saved) and they deliver in about one week turnaround. This was my first time using them but I highly recommend both honestly. 215