Letterpress - Origin Story

Part 1 in a 4 part series of restoring my letterpress in 2014

Much like a superhero, my letterpress has an origin story. Originally shared on my Blogger blog in 2014, I have resurfaced the post. Please note this blog post was written in 2014, I’m genuinely shocked that its still stored in the internet archives lol. I will share multiple posts on this subject including some details on how we restored the press and some impressive before/after shots so be on the lookout for more!

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. The story from the owner is that it was originally used in Denver, Colorado and eventually moved to Oregon with his family. It ended up sitting in the farmhouse basement for the past 50 years. 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. Rolling on pipes is the most genius way to move something of this size!

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 done 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. The amount of rust on the press is daunting, but it’s nothing some hard work can’t fix.