Where to buy quoins and furniture?

John Barrett at Letterpress Things (www.letterpressthings.com is great if you’re in the northeast (and if you’re not, he’ll ship). Or NA Graphics (www.nagraph.com) for all of your letterpress needs. Good luck!

If you get really desperate I have a vast amount of furniture, you can have a shoe-box full free of charge, but you would have to pay the postage from here in England. I have a very few narrow quoins I could let go but they would be cash. You would have to bodge a quoin key from a bent nail (its easy). NA Graphics are a most helpful outfit, I’ve bought from them.

You probably know its properly called the Anglo-American point system and the point (sorry!) is
that our stuff works with yours over there.

warmest regards (despite GWB)

J. Stafford Baker The Happy Dragons Press.

Not much room in a 5x8 chase for furniture, but I’ve got a bunch laying around in the smaller sizes. Mostly metal furniture. Let me know if you’re interested. It won’t be expensive.

The 5” x 8” Kelsey chase is designed so that quoins are not supposed to be necessary. Note that there are two screws on each of two sides of the chase. If the chase is fairly snuggly filled with furniture, these screws can to tightened to apply enough pressure to lock everything in place. A good tip is to have some sort of hard metal furniture along the edges that will contact the screws so that the screws don’t “chew up” your furniture.

email us your specific needs. We can accommodate.

I have a lot of old quoins and furniture. I am in Illinois

Email us your specific needs. We can accommodate.

Can you make your own furniture?

Yes. Especially if you have a really accurate saw like a hammond Glider or C&G. But there’s lots of old furniture out there available for relatively cheap prices. Why go to all the trouble?

Hi,

I run a community fine art printing press and have starting to put some funding into letterpress equipment. Having a real time of it finding furniture though.. can anyone help us out or point us in the right direction?

thanks

For years been getting supplies like quoins, quad guides from
American Printing Equipment & Supply,seems like they’ve been around forever

Speaking of furniture…is anyone familiar with idea that you don’t use metal furniture against other metal but have to alternate metal and wood? I remember my supervisor saying that over twenty years ago when I was starting out. He was an “old school” printer. Or am I dreaming? Ron

Ron, i heard the same thing, don’t put quions against the chase, no metal furniture against the chase. The last job i had was setting foundry type for a company that made rubber plates to print on corrugated boxes, a lotof our forms wouldn’t even fit in a meihle vertical chase, they had aluminum chases made and all the furniture was aluminum, we used high speed quoins to lock up and had to tighten them so hard that we broke quoin keys all the time, we would break a few quoins a year also, these chases went to a moulding room where they made a mould from them, if they weren’t very tight they would pi when the mould was pulled off. That aluminum furniture was the best stuff i ever saw, but i never saw it anywhere else. Dick G.

Whew! Thanks Dick, I was wondering if it was my imagination because it was so many years ago. The majority of the time we use wood furniture anyway as it’s much lighter. Ron

I was also taught to not put metal against metal..

Does anyone have a stack of furniture for sale or know where we could pick up a load…?

Cheers all.. paul

I’m starting up with an Adana 8x5 to learn the process and to print a few small design jobs. My press didn’t come with any quoins or furniture, so I have a few questions:

Foolproof546, you said the Kelsey was designed to not need quoins. Is this true for the Adana as well?

Dan, can you accomodate for the correct size coins I need?

Do I need any other parts to set up the quoins? A quoin key? I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know what that is…

Lastly, I’m ordering my base and am not sure if I need a standard or deep relief base. Do you have advice? I’m worried that I may run into issues with the rollers if I order deep relief.

I’d really appreciate any feedback! Thanks in advance!

Here’s a link to photos of the press if you need for reference:
http://www.cwhimsydesigns.com/2011/08/letterpress-set-up.html

CWhimsy -

Unfortunately the Kelsey chases are the only ones that I know of that have the screws built-into them to eliminate the need for quoins.

Rick

CWhimsy, you should be able to get by with 3 or 4 wickersham quions, they come in 3 sizes, the smallest would work on a 5x8, you will need a quoin key also, the key is used to tighten the quoin. I’m not sure about the base, i use 1/4” mag dies and mount them on my furniture. Dick G.

I’ve had great success finding fill-in equipment on eBay. I purchased an old cabinet full of furniture and another cabinet full of reglets. I didn’t have experience using reglets before and have found them to be invaluable! The only problem from the eBay purchases was the cabinets/furniture/reglets were very dirty and full of cobwebs, necessitating a thorough cleaning before use.

I, too, use Wickersham quoins. Perfect sizes for my C&P Pilot.

Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback! I just came across 4 cornerstone (supposed to be the same as wickersham, right?) quoins and a key on ebay, so I just need to get the base next. Thank you again!