FWIW, the way the double grips are the tongue has some room for compression and on the quads it’s more rigid and less forgiving.

I have no problem scoring lettra, though I always score with the grain. I use 2 pt rule and chipboard as the matrix.

On the double grip the tongue is fine. You have to make sure that you don’t print on the tongue though. Nothing bad happens if you do, it just bends it a little. You have to make sure that the actual body of the double grip doesn’t get crushed by the base. 

I’ll put my plate on the base in the bottom left with the crop marks right up against the edge and print on the tympan. Since the crop marks are at the very edge of the base I’ll know where the limit is for my gauge pins to go. The double grip are great for making minute adjustments for register.

I have quads but havent used them with the base. Sorry.

I’ve had this exact issue. Also, I’ve had ink disappear in random places if the rollers get too dirty from picking up too much fiber off the lettra. I can usually see on the ink disk how dirty everything is getting.

I had a mess of ball 4oz jelly jars lying around. they’re wide mouth and shallow so they’ve been great.

http://www.amazon.com/Ball-Quilted-Jelly-Canning-Case/dp/B000VTSYA8

I normally use crisco but when I’m in a hurry I use a few sprays of goo-gone. Goo-gone is like magic compared to the crisco.

For packing, I use red pressboard and then paper that has it’s thickness printed on it. I think there are six thicknesses between .002″ and .16″ Knowing the caliper makes it easy when adjusting makeready.

Well, if you’re cycling the press the correct way the teeth should be moving toward you and then down, so there’s not really an issue of anything getting grabbed and sucked in by the teeth.

That said, my new style came with a guard built into the support for the feed table that covers the top of the gear and then a piece of metal was just screwed onto that to make the guard cover more of the gear.

Take a look at Stitch Labs or Freshbooks. I haven’t used either but they seem popular among the small business and craftier types. Both are web-based.

Place crop marks and registration marks on the plates for each color and then line up the marks.

Also, depending on the work, check out the two color one plate video: http://www.boxcarpress.com/community/letterpress-training-video.html

I use Boxcar. I’m only a few hours away from them so if I place an order Monday morning I can get my plates on Wednesday

I use one of these if someone wants a proof of a custom color mix.

I take the plates from an old job, and with a brayer ink it up with the mixed color. It’s a lot easier and quicker to clean than my C&P is…

It works best if you don’t use any of the supplies that came with it. I ink my brayer off of a glass plate, use a 6″ speedball brayer, and use spare pieces of photopolymer as roller bearers to keep the inking even. I register using gaffers tape and pieces of cardstock.

I also picked it up before they were excluded from the 60% off coupons 🙂

It uses KF-152 plates just like my C&P

I find my workflow goes best when sketching in photoshop and then taking that into illustrator to convert to a vector file. I usually use the pen tool for doing the vector portion rather than using Live Trace.

Inkscape is an open source (and free) vector program that has a good calligraphy tool (I set my pen options at 13 width, caps 1, mass 40, and everything else at 0) that makes drawing curves freehand pretty natural. You have to go to file > input devices to enable the pen though. It doesn’t have support for most opentype font features, so I still use Illustrator the most.

I really dont use InDesign at all since Illustrator can handle fonts pretty well.

For acrylic-based, I’ve used this once at the local book arts center to get a silver metallic off my hands: http://www.pressmanspride.com/reallyworks6-45lb.aspx It worked amazingly well but seems pretty expensive.

You could try calling local print shops and see if they know of anyone looking to get rid of one.

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