Antique Business Card Letterpress [Restoration]

This restoration is on a Chicago No.11 printing press made by the Sigwalt Mfg. Co., possibly in the 1920s. I do not know the exact date of manufacture of this specific unit as Sigwalt made these kinds of letterpresses for decades.

When I received this tool, I immediately notice the massive chuck of cast iron missing from the corner of the base and that both in rollers were missing, but otherwise the printing press was in great condition. The pin-striping and floral decals were mostly intact and the make and model decals were fully intact. Unfortunately, everything original had to be destroyed in order for me to make a large repair to the missing/broken section. It took several photos combined with research online to piece together a complete design of the now destroyed decals. I used modern oil-resistant rubber as the new ink roller material.

The restoration was fairly straight-forward as there are almost no screws holding this thing together. The original lead letters were still in the chase, so I used those to print example business cards once restored. The original letters spelled out " Clough Drug Store" from Seymour, Texas with a 3 digit phone number. I could find exactly when this town in Texas has this store or only 3 digit phone numbers, but it's definitely before the 1940s.

The press takes some fine-tuning to get the prints perfectly dialled in, but once they are, you can go crazy and print quite a lot pretty quickly. I think this would be fun to use if I could custom CNC something I find interesting in the future to use as a printing stamp.

Big thank you to ‪@dpmakestuff‬ and ‪@jimmydiresta‬ for their help during the restoration procedure!

I'd like to thank @CRCAutoUS for sponsoring this video. I've switched to a food-grade penetrating oil from them as a more safe alternative, and it as worked just as well as the usual penetrating oils I've used.

You can check out the products from them used in this video in the link below:
https://www.crcindustries.com/handtoo...

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