Part of the Metal Type’s Printing Advice section, Phil gives his thoughts on various presses.
Kluge, Heidelberg or hand fed C & P? All of these machines are good for Letterpress Printing. These machines will do what the makers say that they will do, and there is no doubt about that at all.
If you have long runs, then you will eschew the hand fed in favour of the other two machines.
However . . . the hand fed C & P will print items that are pretty much impossible on either of the self feeding presses. For example, prize ribbons that are 2 inches wide by 15 inches long. Or very thin table napkins or round discs. or very thick items, that are up to a quarter of an inch thick, like wood rulers or wood nickels or many other kinds of thick items either of wood or super heavy yardstick.
Heidelberg
The Heidelberg is rather easy to “set up,’’ to run most any kind of job. Small cars of down to about and inch and a half to 2 or more inches long are easily fed and printed on a Heidelberg. Paper as thick as about 20 thousands of an inch can be fed, and with a special feed bar, even thicker, up to 50 thousands of an inch. Heidelberg did make a number of “special attachments for the feeder, to facilitate feeding and printing.
Super heavy inking on the 10 x 15 was not so good. Even with the single overrider roller, some forms were well neigh impossible to run. I always ran such super heavy inking forms on my 13 x 18 Heidelberg and use the double over rider rollers. In addition, I had a set of roller trucks that allowed inking on the lower of the three form rollers on the upstroke only. This helped immensely.
However if the job was near a full black out, I reverted to my Heidelberg Cylinder, and if that failed, I just farmed the job out to a nearby offset shop.
Kluge
I have no experience at all with the Kluge. I have seen this machines of course and talked to various press operators, and these men have invariably told me that the Kluge is a good machine and will print a very wide range of stock at good speeds and with very good quality of print.
I was in a really big shop in Minneapolis some 64 years ago now, where they had 10 Kluges. This machine was built in that city. They also had two windmills; one a 10 x 15 and the other a 13 x 18. The platen letterpress foreman told me that his staff much preferred the Kluge.
One man will like the Heidelberg and the other man will like the Kluge. I have always thought that a nice heavy hand fed Kluge or a hand fed Craftsman C & P with overrider form rollers would make the nicest platen press that any printer could ever want.