Rebuilding a Vandercook No. 1

Recently I acquired a No. 1 that looks like it was stored in a barn for a few decades, almost the entire press was uniformly rusted (although no bird droppings). Most of it has been easy to disassemble and clean, but so far I haven’t been able to strip down the impression cylinder past the handle, gear rings, and wheels; any ideas on that? There is still rust I’d like to remove if possible and sloshing chemical rust remover around isn’t my preferred method.

After that, is there any guidance for setting the upper rail height or other clearances? It appears that the outer rings of the cylinder ride on the bed’s rails and that the small wheels and upper rails hold the cylinder down. I can kind of do it by feel with a couple of precision spacers, but that’s making things up as I go along. (My understanding is that “type high” here is 0.918” + 0.050”, and the impression cylinder is usually undercut by 0.040”, haven’t found the marking but it’s measurable, so bed to cylinder should be 1.008”; I have the tools to measure that. I also have a way to check the bed’s flatness once I carefully get most of the rust off; I’m doing most of the work in a machine shop.)

Does anyone have a manual for this press (was there one)? It’s certainly not a complex machine but it would be nice to have it (and online searches haven’t turned up anything, including on letterpresscomons and vandercook.info).

(I’ll post the s/n later, I can’t remember it at the moment.)

Thanks.

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