Day 1
So I bought a letterpress... I'm not sure how it happened, but it did. I set out to buy a small tabletop press, I ended up with a 1,000+lb. cast iron machine with a layer of rust on every surface. But I love it, it's incredible.
We picked it up in Coquille, Oregon, about an 8 hour drive from my house. It was buried in a (moldy) basement so it took about 3 hours for my dad and I to move. The first thing was to replace the wood skids that attach to the feet, they were rotten. After that we tipped it up and rolled 3 pipes under, rolling it over the pipes to the door was crazy easy.
There was a 10" lip at the door (thankfully no stairs!) so we tilted it up and pushed it through the doorway, easier said than done given we had about a 1/2" clearance through the doorway. We used a come-along attached to the truck and press to wench it out of the doorway and up the small hill outside of it. The come-along is a life saver, we could not have on it without one. Eventually we had it teetering in a good position on the hill to back in the trailer, use the come along and pipes to roll it into place.
We strapped it down like crazy, it would be awful if this thing came off the tailer on the freeway! We had removed the feed boards inside, but we didn't take anything else off. It was far too rusted and we had no assessed the press well enough yet to start pulling parts off.
When we got home I started researching to figure out what type of press it is, the seller had thought it was a Chandler and Price but it doesn't have a serial number and a few other indicators that it isn't. Eventually I dug deep enough in the internet to find out it is a Gordon Franklin Oldstyle circa 1851-1871. For being such an old press it is in extremely good condition! Without any cleaning, it runs and functions perfectly. There aren't any cracked castings and only one missing part that is easily replaced.
I'll post the beginning of the restoration tomorrow!
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