Windmill bottom guide/ retrieval issue
An evil demon has inhabited our sweet Windmill with a new and dark possession, can you help friends of Briar Press?
The arms are dropping the paper onto the guides correctly, but, after impression, the arm does not retrieve the sheet and it gets sucked into the black soul of the Heidi. I have changed the packing, cleaned and generously lubed all parts of the bottom guide mechanism, cleaned the inside of the arms with alcohol, and cleaned the platen regularly to inhibit static, which I thought may be causing this problem.
When I print without guides, the paper feeds and delivers without issue and the grippers are grabbing consistently at 18 pts. This leads me to believe that this isn’t an issue with the press’ arms but something more mystical. I have a tight registration and don’t want to run the press without guides, hence my attempt to fix whatever is going wrong.
Anyone have any tips?
Thanks much!
Natalie
Since we had to teach ourselves the running of a windmill we got good at what not to do. The first time we tried to run to guides it was horrible. Over time we found who ever had the press before had put a nickel guide on with a brass one and that was the way the press came to us. We bought a new set of guides and still no luck. We looked at online videos still no luck. We discovered our back guide was on upside down. Yes stupid I know but that was the way it came to us and even saw videos setup up that way. We knew we had followed all the setup steps for guides but still had issues. We found that when we setup we control for the left lay guide in the feeder we set it so the sheet does not have to travel to far into the guides and at the same time making sure we are not so far away that it has a long drop into the guides. We also found that if we got to far out on the guide that the register guide was almost trying to hit the sheet before it was released from the gripper. Another mistake we made was forgetting to recenter the fence. We had moved it for a text alignment but feeding a sheet in on a skew running guides messed with the sheet as it dropped into the guides. Good luck hope it works.