Restoring a 1956 Vandercook proof press

A Vandercook proof press is what letterpress printers use to pull proofs before committing to a full run on a larger production press. The Vandercook moves an inked cylinder across a flat type bed; you place a sheet, walk the cylinder over it, and pull a single impression. Proofs are slow to make and easy to correct. Production runs on the Heidelberg are fast and difficult to correct. The two presses are complementary, and a workshop without both is fighting against its tools.

I bought my Vandercook in 2016 from a sign shop in Helmond that had closed the previous year. The previous owner, a printer in his late seventies who had run the shop alone for forty years, sold it to me for what it would have cost me to rent a small truck. He was, by his own account, simply tired of looking at it. The press came with two boxes of ink rollers, a half-set of 18-point Caslon, and a hand-drawn maintenance log that I now keep in a glass case.

What was broken

The Vandercook had not been used since 1998. The cylinder rubber had hardened beyond restoration; the inking rollers were unusable; the bed had a slight warp; the trip mechanism (which lifts the cylinder over the type bed when you pull the handle back) was seized. None of these were fatal. They were, collectively, eighteen months of work.

The cylinder rubber

The cylinder rubber is a single sheet of soft rubber, vulcanised to the cylinder core, that does the actual job of pressing the paper into the type. The original was Buna-N rubber, formulated specifically for Vandercook by NewsKing in the 1950s. NewsKing closed in 1979. The replacement rubber I sourced is a Dutch Buna-N substitute, slightly harder than the original, manufactured in batches of three or four cylinders per year by a single supplier in Eindhoven. The recover process, stripping the old rubber, machining the cylinder core, vulcanising the new rubber, then turning the cylinder back to round on a lathe, took six months and three trips to Eindhoven.

The bed warp

The Vandercook bed is a single piece of cast iron, machined flat to a tolerance of about 0.05 mm across the bed. Mine was warped by about 0.4 mm at the centre, which sounds small but produces a visible ghost in any solid block of type. The bed was sent to a precision machinist in Den Bosch who skim-cut it back to flat. This took two months, mostly waiting for him to have a slot. The cost was non-trivial but, in retrospect, the most necessary expense of the entire restoration. A warped bed cannot be printed around.

What it has done since

The Vandercook has produced every proof of every broadside in the archive. The workflow is straightforward: I set the type, lock it into a chase, transfer the chase to the Vandercook bed, pull three proofs, mark up the corrections, return to the type, correct, pull three more proofs, and continue until the proofs are clean. Only then does the chase move to the Heidelberg for the production run.

It is slow. It is the slowness that makes the broadsides what they are.