daniele capo

In december I’ve built a printing press. The problem was that I really loved the idea of trying printing something but I could not buy a real press (for two reason: lack of money and my ‘retired’ way of living). I started observing photos, videos and drawings of handpresses, and then I made my own drawings. This period of taking notes was very long. I needed to understand how the pressure is transferred trough the levers, and the sketching process helped me a lot.

After (and during) the sketch phase I made a tour to find materials. I decided to build everything with wood, trying to minimize the cutting process. Well, while I was choosing materials I needed the press was redrawn two, three, four time. At the end I’ve never drawn a real plan (maybe to avoid remembering my years as architect), only sketches, maybe procedural sketches.

In spite of my lack of plans the building phase was almost easy. Well, of course, my press have a lot of problems (pressure, precision &c.) but, as the old wisdom says, you learn by making mistakes, and you can also gain a philosophical knowledge:
Consider an action. The action interacts/interferes with the environment. The environment respond with a resistance. Actually you know your action through the resistance of the environment. For example, if you have to hold an object, you can measure the force you apply by means of the resistance of the object (and for me this is why driving a car is easy compared to driving a car in a videogame – well, maybe now videogames have physical feedback, I don’t know.)

Having made a press on my own, and having tryied to operate it allowed me to know unexepected things. After that I was able, for example, to actually see how an iron handpress worked, and was not by means of a simple lever.

In the next post I examine two different way for building a press.