Welcome to the pending home of Paw Printery, an adventure in small size
letterpress printing.
Paw Printery's "print engine" is a tabletop Adana HS2 with a 4 by six inch chase. Adana was an English company
whose most successful product was the design and marketing of small platen presses for hobbyists.
This sturdy little press was made
an estimated 50 to 60 years ago and still works beautifully. All it really
needed to print was new rollers and a little tweaking.
(Consider that a new digital printer will last two years... if that.)
The
technology is essentially Victorian - it is manually operated. Fortunately, the Adana tabletop is also mostly idiot-proof and it is possible to download the original operating manual,
which
is also a primer for beginners on how to print.
I have named my press Qtasbug...because it is. Click here to see our first prints.
Paw Printery is so named because one of my other major interests is dog sports -
particularly dog agility - so I also share my home with three Shetland Sheepdogs (Shelties).
There are usually dogs underfoot, no matter what I'm doing.
Click here to see video of Shade - my three-year-old, bi-black Sheltie and I - at an agility trial.
In this video we're in starters, the beginner level, but we're having lots of fun.
Here's the new 'toy' ... a very old stamp press... it measures approximately one foot by one foot by one foot
on the base; the mechanism adds another 10 inches or so; the length with the 'rail' is two feet. It is SUPER heavy.
It's not at all pretty but the wheel does turn and raise and lower the press.
