c&p pilot gripper

Are you missing the grippers or the whole gripper assembly (gripper bar, spring, etc). Either way you should be able to get all you need (and more) from Dave Churchman. Send me a private message if you need his email address… I don’t want to post it without his permission.

Best,
Brad.

If you can’t buy one, you can make a gripper out of an old metal curtain rod, flattened down, with a hole drilled through the bottom for the bolt. I’ve been using a curtain rod gripper on my 8 X 12 since 1975, and it was old then.

Kevin,

That would work well on a floor model, but the setup is a little different on the Pilot. The gripper bar actually runs through the grippers so you’d need to wrap the curtain rod around a rod and use a thumbscrew to fasten it. Not impossible by any means, but I am almost positive Dave Churchman has these parts on hand.

Best,
Brad.

What’s a gripper bar?
None of my hand fed platens have “grippers”.
To hold the blank paper in place and maintain register, I use 3 laypins. As a means of easing “release” of the printed sheet from the type I use “friskets”. They are sliding flat metal fingers that are moveable, then bolt tightened, left and right and they keep the paper pressed to the paper platen so it doesn’t get tangled in the inking rollers as the platens open.
Only on my Adana’s is there an equivalent “lay pin” assemble which is a grooved flat thin metal bar that stops the paper from slipping through the machine. This is adjustable to suit the size of the sheet to be printed. Still needs friskets.

The gripper bar, as I know it, is found on machines that need to grip and hold tight paper as the paper is moved through an automated or semi automated impression, such as the Windmill mechanics of the automatic Heidelberg, or say a Vertical Meihle. Old style hand fed cylinders need the sheet to be gripped as it took the paper from the human hand feeder to the delivery end of the machine.
My floor standing CPs and my table top Pilot use laypins.
I’m very interested in what a gripper bar is on a hand fed platen .
William Amer, Australian
Compositor and Printer

Grippers and friskets are the same thing, but in different countries. We Americans have grippers on both platens and cylinder presses. And to us a frisket is material stretched between the grippers to hold down or mask the sheet. More commonly, we attach gripper fingers to the grippers. We also feed the sheet to guage pins rather than lay pins.