Summary
There’s an old joke about inviting a girl up to your dorm room to ‘look at your etchings’– but if you’re going to do that, you’d best have some etchings, lest she call your bluff. Even better would be to have prints available, so you might share your hard work with adoring fans. Over on YouTube, [This Designed That] shows building the perfect little etching press so you need never invite anyone to your room again: you can crank out enough prints on this bad boy to hand out your etchings on a street corner! Crank is the right word, because it’s hand-cranked, with the rollers chain-driven off a separate driveshaft. It works like, well, a roller press: two steel rollers squeeze a plattern holding your inked etching and a of paper together to put an image onto. His choice of an off-cut of steel pipe to use as the top roller is inspired, even if he did have to turn it down quite a bit to get an even radius and smooth surface finish. The whole thing is very well made, and all of it hand-machined except for off-the-shelf bearings and the yellow side plates, which were commercially CNC’d. We also appreciate that [This Designed That] took the time to prove the merit of his machine by showing the press in work, and the resulting prints. We’re not art critics, but we are willing to say this makes a good impression. [This Designed That] is both printer and machinist, and we’ve seen his print projects before, like using resin prints for foil stamping or a DIY proofing press that seems to share some DNA with this larger project. Thanks to [Paul Manwaring] for the tip! “squeeze a plattern” – platen, surely? A spoonerism with “please a slattern” Tip for this content maker: people want to see some final footage of the thing in action, making prints or etchings or whatever. Intersplice some of that throughout, especially the long tripod-shot segments where you are standing next to it talking. Definitely will add a lot of interest. We are modern people with less attention span than a gnat. ~9:20 in, sorry if your tiktok brainrot can not watch a video and see the results. But if it truly is too much to watch anything over 30 seconds just jump to that time and see what it can do. Very nice build