Oiling the 12x18 Chandler & Price (C&P) Letterpress

Do you own a letterpress? Take care in oiling it properly! There are over 50 spots you need to pay attention to, oiling the press. These old letterpress machines use steam-engine technology (cast-iron journals with steel shafts), serious damage is the results from lack of lubrication. Use Way Oil, its the closest to machine oil from 100 years ago (when these machines were designed & built). Engine oil and other modern oils do not have the load carrying and sticky quality required for the lubrication to last more than a few minutes. On my machine I had to re-bush the frame-lock follower roller because it had obviously been forgotten too often.

[@TroyeWelch]

I’m glad that you did this as someone needed too. I agree with 99% of what’s presented here. The only exception is any place a roller follows a guide or cam, that SURFACE should NOT be lubricated as you want the roller to roll and not slide. If it starts sliding, it will wear a flat on it and then it won’t roll right after that. You want a film of oil between two surfaces of metal that slide past either, either round or flat, but you wouldn’t oil the tires on your car in the same way that you keep the hub bearings greased and axle oiled. So oil the sliding portion of any bearing yes, but NOT the guide surface that a guide wheel ROLLS on. Yes, lube the axle/bearing of the guide wheel.
Great effort should be made to clean any spilled oil off these surfaces. The same thing goes for the roller trucks. You don’t oil the rails or surfaces of the trucks because you want the rollers to roll and not slide. You have to be careful oiling the roller saddles so that excess oil doesn’t run down onto the trucks and get smeared on the rails. The rollers themselves will get the roller turning when they hit the form if the trucks are already sliding, but that’s bad, errr, form.., and you’ll get smearing. I think the designers of these machines didn’t anticipate that these would be around for 100+ years or they would have chosen a softer metal like brass/bronze (or even Bakelite, which came out in 1907) instead of steel trucks, which combined with oiling snafus mentioned, contributed to the widespread rail wear that were today on many of these presses (which is why you see people taping the rails all the time. Expanding/adjustable trucks are a bad solution as it creates a surface speed mismatch between the trucks and roller surface which causes ink smearing). This is why we use white or black Delrin now for the truck material (and the bonus is that it’s quieter)

[@FailBetterPress]

I'm wondering if you could kindly list the points of lubrication as you've ordered them in the video, from 1 thru 49. It would be immensely helpful to have the steps typed out and the proper names for the parts of the press.

[@AlohaGirlCreative]

This machine is beautiful is it still for sale!

[@byHugodotcom]

Sorry, sold last week.