#write-a-sign

I’m going to be alternating old and new content, because there’s a fair amount of letterpress stuff I never posted to Tumblr. Some of this stuff, including this post I’m not even going to bother editing the pictures. 

This was from last December and was a bereavement gift for a friend. I’ve also given some out as birthday gifts too. Swears are good for all occasions I guess!

I forgot to mention this on Tumblr before, but I got a new press! You might remember that I have a Morgan Sign Printing Company Write-A-Sign show card press, but I added a small Line-O-Scribe to my studio in June.

Everything was gross with decades of grime, grease, and ink, but a few days of hard work, plenty of WD-40, and a heat gun, the press is refurbished and the ink plate is clean and removable as intended. The ink plate was seriously gross and took forever to get the goop in between the glass and the base to separate. 

The smaller size made it a lot easier to understand how the axles should be tightened and aligned, which meant I could readjust the other press to run smoother.

A lot happened in the last 24 hours and I’ll divide everything that happened over a few days! 

For starters, I figured out how to disassemble my Morgan Sign Company Write-A-Sign poster/showcard press to clean it and clear out junk I could see in the tracks. The roller and bearings didn’t glide across the rails smoothly. 

Fortunately all my bike tools were perfect for this press and I was able to take it apart, clean the bearings as much as I could, regreased them, and reassembled everything. Even before I took it apart, I could tell the roller was drifting side to side on the rails and only two bearings would touch the rails at a time. 

I did my best to tighten them to travel straighter, but the roller still lurches from the bearings as it travels across. I think it’s partially because there is still stuff stuck in the bearings, but also because one rail is gouged out slightly from misuse from a previous owner. 

It rolls 100 times better, but I need to track down compatible bearings for the rails and maybe flip the rails so the gouged part is at the bottom rather than at the top by the paper clip.

Just a little experiment to try out chroma key for the first time in After Effects for a looping video header on my design portfolio. I’ll be making a longer video soon that will key a lot of blue out of things. 

I shared the first thing I printed on the big Line-O-Scribe after moving in and setting up the press and this is the first thing I threw on the Write-A-Sign hahah. 

More Write-A-Sign experiments. 

First attempts to cram all 3 type designs on the bed was a terrible sloppy mess hahah. It worked better when it was only one or two.