Presstoration, Part I

It's been a busy week for me. I started on the restoration of my new letterpress. I'm loving every minute of it.

What I really love is looking back at what I started with. And I look at what I have now and realize that it's all worth that agonizingly sore back I have from bending over press parts all week.

I started this week with all the easily accessible parts of the press. When I bought the press, I thought it was black. That's probably easily understandable based on this picture I had of the press when I made arrangements to buy it.

And when I started working on the restoration, I still thought it was black. But then I started scrubbing and realized the "black" was really grease and decades of grime. In reality, the press had been painted battle ship grey and red. No joke.

Take the fly wheel, for example.

See? Grime. And Gunk. Lots of Gunk.

Here it is after a thorough scrubbing with Greased Lightning (seriously the best stuff ever for getting off caked on Gunk!) and lots of coats of paint stripper and lots of scrubbing with a wire brush.

And here it is after a coat of primer.

And after two coats of paint. Aw, shucks. I love my fly wheel.

But the best kind of before-and-afters are when the "before" is so awful, so horrible, so tragically gross that you stand there speechless when you see the "after". Like in this example. My press has a motor that runs the press via a belt that wraps around this wheel. And it was g-r-o-s-s.

It took me an hour and two razor blades to scrape all the old belt gunk off that thing.

But it was all worth it.