It's alive!

Are you excited? Well you should be. Here is my first Pearl printing adventure. Firstly, don't make a wood chase. Well, maybe in a pinch, but reinforce it lots. And lots. We made this one to try to get around the chase-clamp problem. The rollers are the right height for the ink disk and the type, so my idea of putting tires on the trucks flew out the window. We decided the chase might be slightly the wrong size (the one I have was made for a #3, not a #11). The wood chase expanded far too much from the quoin pressure, so I decided just to run with the #3 chase for now since it isn't damaging the rollers.

Here's the platen all set up, with giant balloon letters, before and after inking up. I ran it once very slowly and carefully without ink to make sure I wasn't going to squash anything in the process of adjusting the platen.

We adjusted the platen's height with the four screws on the back. We started with the platen closed, so we could get it approximately the right height, and then tinkered with them one by one by trial and error. I was very conservative with the pressure, focusing on getting the print even. I'll probably have to raise it a bit more in the future. Wowza, look at it go (don't worry, we oiled it right after I shot this.):