If you watched my video I posted a few entries ago, you may have noticed that the left side of my plate wasn’t being inked. After some troubleshooting I discovered the issue was my morgan expansion trucks. But what does that even MEAN?

Think of the truck as a wheel that sits at the end of the roller. The truck guides the roller down the rails and over the plate. Imagine if the right side of you car had 2 flat tires, while the left side were fully inflated. This is what happened with my trucks. The right side trucks were flatter, so the rollers came closer to the plate.

You see those two, perfect little circles of rubber? That is the replacement rubber. Do you see those swollen, cracked tires? Those are the cause of some of the previous woes.

Compare and be amazed!

It was really just by luck I was able to get the plate inked at all. I’ve taken apart the trucks and cleaned about 30 years of grime off them and will be reassembling them soon. I have enough of the replacement rubber to last 2 sets of trucks (2 trucks per roller, and 3 rollers, so 6 trucks). From my quick test it seems like the trucks were the main issue, although I already know I need to replace at least one of my rollers as well.

I also received six tubes of ink, including, disappointingly, a tube of red which matches my already-owned giant can of red. So expect to see a lot of red ink used on the testing and promotional stuff.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 5:55 am and is filed under letterpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.