#lithgraphers

any lithographers know when/who made this kind of roller…never seen the leather sewn on like this. taking a crack at refurbishing. thoughts? please share your secrets? #petrichor press #diehler

edit: Thank you, Emily Diehler for answering my questiong of roller conditioning as follows:

You’ll need to get all the dead ink out of the leather, as much as you can. Coat it in floor stripper, then scrape the roller normally. You’ll need to do this a few times, depending on how bad of condition it is in. Once it’s down to bare leather, you can start the reconditioning process. Important to say is that once you start the reconditioning process, you have to be in a position to care for it every day until it’s put into black ink. You cannot stop part way through the process.

Start with neatsfoot oil, pour a small puddle in your hand and apply an even coat to the leather, until the entire thing is damp. You want to avoid over saturating the leather with the oil, because it’s possible for it to soak through to the felts underneath the roller. I used olive oil on my roller, which worked fine although some people avoid using it because it has the possibility of going rancid. After the coat is applied let the roller sit out in the open air (indoors) over night. The next day feel the leather, it should be slightly damp, if too dry apply another coat of neatsfoot and let sit unwrapped again. The next day you scrape out the neatsfoot, being careful to not apply an extreme amount of pressure or over scrape. You then move to the next varnish, applying an even coat, letting sit over night, then scraping out the next morning. Work all the way through the varnishes, rolling them out on the glass once they start getting tacky. 

When you’ve moved through the varnishes, you can introduce it to black ink. Start with a roll up ink, and you’ll find that the roller will want to reject the ink, you’ll probably have to kind of force it into accepting the ink by pressing it into the leather using an ink knife. Once it’s totally in black ink you can start rolling up flats (or some discarded aluminum plate). Sponge the plate super loose, so that there is a lot of water still on the plate when you go to roll on it. The water helps shock the leather and raise the nap back up. Your roller will not want to ink up evenly at first, and will take lots and lots of passes to ink up. When you are down rolling up, scrape out the old water logged ink and roll up with fresh ink, then wrap up the roller, keep the roller wrapped up in plastic or foil after this point. Once it’s in black ink you don’t have to deal with it every day, but the more you scrape it and roll up flats the faster it will get happy again. The next time you open your roller, you want to scrape it, and roll it up in shop mix, then roll up flats with the shop mix. Then the next time, you will move to crayon black, then back to roll up ink… etc. What’s going to condition your roller the fastest is rotating inks when rolling up flats and lots of water. 

10/4/13

printmaking  roller conditioning  lithography