Anyone need rollers recovered?
Hi folks! I’ve just gotten my hands on a second Miehle vertical, and a little 3×5 Kelsey; between the three presses and some spares there’s not one but seventeen rollers that need recovery, and four more that’ll need attention soon enough…
…so I figure I’ll set myself up to cast and grind rubber rollers in the near future. Timeline still unknown, but if anyone would like to send in rollers I will gladly recover them for the cost of some honest feedback on how they perform on your press (and shipping).
I assume you will be using some sort of pourable polyurethane rubber ?
Printers have a pretty bad history with that kind of roller.
Exposure to ink and solvents over the course of years can cause them to spontaneously decompose into goo sometimes overnight.
Most of use prefer sheet rubber that’s been vulcanized onto the cores these days.
are you able to grind rubber. would like to know more
Though I’m aware of the urethane depolymerization problem, first experiments will be with off-the-shelf castable urethane so I can focus on really nailing the grinding process – this almost certainly involves cryo-cooling and a lightly modified copy sander or heavily modified lathe.
Once I’ve got a process for grinding to diameter, we’ll move on to pressure-cast and vulcanized natural rubber… since the molds are cylindrical and diameter isn’t critical (thanks to the grinding), I should be able to whip up a serviceable pressure-molding machine without pouring thousands into mold-making. Hopefully raw rubber suppliers will be amenable to a relatively small order for testing.
edit: Todd I’ve only just now put two and two together and realized you’re one of the folks who keeps coming up in my research on the topic. Would love to talk process with you if you’re open to it.
sounds good this was my side hustle not sure how it became my job. if it was easy everyone would do it.
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I have a couple of small table top hand presses that need rollers. Definitely want rubber though, not urethane (already have to clean up a mess from a set of those).
Hit me up when you get to that point, I don’t mind being a guinea pig to help you figure things out.