We applaud innovators and inventors, where would printing be without it? We offer two of the most common homemade press designs from the internet.
Links to homemade press info
Book Press Design
Hydraulic Jack Press
To print with a home-constructed press, here are the items suggested for printing:
- we offer our Boxcar Press platemaking services. Our KF152 photopolymer plate with the adhesive backing works beautifully for homemade presses.
- Inking with a homemade press requires a soft rubber brayer (6” minimum suggested) that can be purchased from your arts store or McClain Printmaking.
- Plate strips to serve as roller bearers for your brayer when inking. Just ask us to send you a few plate strips when placing your order.
- Boxcar Press Ink Knife.
- Henry Gage Pins for paper registration.
- Printing Inks – for best results -Rubber based or oil based from Boxcar Press.
- Old cotton tshirts for clean up rags.
- Extra 1 or 2 sheets of glass or smooth acrylic for inking.
Before you start printing, we encourage you to read our blog posting which has some instructional tips on inking on home machines.
Homemade presses are better suited for light impression printing. Suggested papers and where to buy are:
- Cotton and bamboo papers from Legion Paper’s letterpresspapers.com
- Crane’s Lettra from Neenah Papers
Enjoy your experience letterpress printing on your homemade press. Your results will be something you can be proud of.
We can help! Get your files into us by 1 p.m. EST on Friday (and make sure your design files are prepared just right!). Choose our rush service which means we’ll ship your plates Friday. Choose overnight AM for shipping and Saturday delivery and you’ll have your plates in hand by Saturday, noon. Hooray!
Yes, we offer three levels of rush service:
Yellow service – we ship 7 business days after PDF proof approval, add 15% to cost of order
Orange service – we ship 5 business days after PDF proof approval, add 35% to cost of order
Red service – we ship 3 business days after PDF proof approval, add 60% to the cost of the order This service is subject to availability so please call us with your specific needs and we will see if rush service is available for your order.
Send us all the details on your project, as well as the name of the paper and envelopes you’d like to use. We also need the sheet size you plan to send. Once we have all that information we will figure how much paper we’ll use, taking into account what is needed for setup and waste and let you know how much stock you need to send for your job.
There are some things you should avoid. For instance, light ink letterpressed over dark paper does not work well; dark ink over light colored paper works better. Coated papers are not compatible with letterpress. Foil stamping is not compatible with all papers. Deckle edge papers are okay for 1 color letterpress but not for multiple colors; there is a high waste factor. Please call us for a consultation before you order paper or envelopes. We’ll need to know the paper type, sheet size and all your job specs in order to tell you how much paper or how many envelopes you should provide.
We get asked a lot about soy ink from our customers, since there’s this general feeling that soy ink is THE greenest ink out there. That’s not really true. Soy sheet-fed ink has to be just 20% soy to be labeled a soy ink (the exact % of soy varies depending on the specific ink). Rubber-based and oil-based inks both have 20-30% vegetable-oil (soy and linseed). Linseed oil is the traditional letterpress ink vehicle: it’s what Gutenberg used when he first used ink. Also keep in mind that soy inks are really geared toward high speed printing and loaded with lots of driers—they’re usually very thin, liquidy inks, not ideal for letterpress. In our experience, soy inks don’t transfer well to letterpress printing, and you’ll get the same environmental impact from using oil-based or rubber-based inks.
Custom inks are a good alternative if you don’t have all the the Pantone Basic Colors but you still want to put a specific Pantone color on your press. Some printers prefer ordering custom mix inks for every job they print, though this can get expensive (and, since custom ink mixes come in 1 lb cans, you’ll have a lot leftover).
We recommend going with custom ink particularly in these two situations:
- you’re going to be printing the same color ink over an extended period of time—for example, we ordered custom ink mixes of all the ink colors in our Smock and Bella Figura ink libraries so we can offer consistent color for all customer jobs. This way, if you order a custom ink of say 476U, you’ll know when you need to reorder it a year later it will look exactly the same.
- you’re printing with very light colors or a pastel ink. The formulas for such inks require very precise measurements (.2% yellow plus 99.5% trans white, etc.) and it’s difficult to mix these colors accurately yourself.
First, figure out why your chase isn’t lying level.
- Possibility 1. Your chase might have cracked some time in the past then was welded to repair it. If this is the case, you may need to file or shave off any excess metal that might interfere with your chase being level.
- Possibility 2. You may have a low spot on your chase. You’ll want to add a shim (a small piece of metal) to the chase to level things off.
In either case, use a professional machinist. They can expertly grind down your chase if needed to create a smooth surface, or they can add a shim to your chase to level things out.
Your maximum plate size is actually the size of your base — your photopolymer plates can go right up to the edge of your base. Obviously your relief images and text should not hang over your edge. This is true for both magnetic bases and the Boxcar Base. If you need a little more base for occasional projects, consider a Boxcar Base scrap to add that extra ½” – 1”. Read more about maximum base size.
The Deep Relief Boxcar Base does work fine on cylinder presses or the Windmill — since its base + plates + adhesive still equals a type high surface (.918”) and that is the critical issue for all bases and plates. There is the advantage of holding a slightly finer line with a standard plate but let’s be realistic when we compare. The 94/95 plates will hold a 0.25pt line and the 152 plates will hold a 0.35pt line (when talking inches that is a .0035″ line compared to a .0048″ line. Not much to quibble about. We just like the way a 94 plate works on our windmills with our standard base and that is how we started years ago in the infancy of Boxcar Press. That said, some printers who use the Deep Relief base on their platen presses already may want to use the Deep Relief base on, say, their Vandercook too, so that both presses can share plates — this is totally okay too.
When mounted on their appropriate bases, plastic-backed and steel-backed photopolymer plates both create type-high surfaces for letterpress printing. Both plate types are recyclable. We’ll talk about some of their differences below.
Plastic-backed polymer plates are flexible, transparent, easy to cut, and mount onto a Boxcar Base for simple registration. You’ll find these plates:
- can be cut with scissors in both their unexposed and exposed forms.
- are transparent, meaning you can see the Boxcar Base’s grid through your plate. This allows for simple alignment of your plates to your base: For perfect registration, align a certain element of your plate to the grid: take a horizontal or vertical element in your plate (this could be your registration marks, or a horizontal line in your artwork) and line it up to the grid.
- eliminate plate creep (steel-backed plate users sometimes experience this while on press). The plastic-backed plate’s adhesive is shift resistant, giving you a secure, strong hold during printing (but the adhesive also peels up easily when you’re done printing)
- allow printers to print two color jobs using one plate if the design elements don’t touch. Cut out the second color images/text with a craft knife or scissors and set aside. Print color #1. Set your second color images back in place and pull up the first plate for color #1—perfect registration!
- allow designs to be ganged up on plates closely to save space (and money).
- are reusable. You will be able to reuse the plate many times if you keep the adhesive protected with the blue overlay after printing. You can also replace adhesive for even more extended plate use.
- more prone to curling, especially with large solid areas over time.
- If purchasing unexposed plastic-backed polymer plates, you’ll also want to purchase film adhesive to adhere your plates to your base. If we’re making your plates for you, we include adhesive.
- are suitable for metal clay jewelry.
- Over here at Boxcar, we use plastic-backed plates for all our printing (the Jet 94 Clear plate paired with the Standard Boxcar Base).
Steel-backed polymer plates are compatible with magnetic bases, generally the Patmag or Bunting base. Steel-backed polymer plates:
- require cutting with a metal shear or heavy-duty trimmer. You can use tin snips, though you may end up with kinks in your plate, as tin snips won’t cut as cleanly.
- sometimes shift and creep on your base during printing. Magnets in the base effectively hold a plate from peeling but cannot always hold a plate from moving side to side. The cylinder or rollers of a press can move steel-backed plates out of register (that’s “plate creep”).
- are not transparent. Because magnetic bases aren’t gridded (and you can’t see through these plates), you’ll have to align your plates to your base with a line gauge and possibly registration marks. This works, but it is more time consuming and there’s more room for error.
- are rigid, meaning they don’t bend well. This inflexibility can cause plates to kink and warp when handled so that their corners may work up while on press. Steel-backed plates are, however, very durable and not prone to curling over time.
- can be more expensive than plastic-backed plates because you may require registration or crop marks which makes for a larger plate.
- are difficult to get on and off the base, especially when the base has inlaid magnets. When placing metal plates on a magnetic base, keep fingers clear so they don’t get pinched when the magnet grabs. When taking your plate off the base, try an ink knife to pry under the plates to release from the magnetic base.
- have sharp edges, which dictate extra care when handling.
- can be used for a wide range of printing and impression—on leather, metal clay jewelry, ultra heavy-weight paper stocks. Steel-backed plates can also be used on etching presses when relief printing is desired. They are not suitable for high temperatures of foil stamping though.