Green Dolphin Press Moves to Connecticut
This was our garage before the move - filled with clutter and badly needing some cleaning and preparation. | |
Although I had known that I would be moving in the printing shop, I couldn't help putting the occasional deck chair or garden tool in it, even temporarily. | |
I am about to find space elsewhere for everything, sweep out the floor, rust-treat the iron columns holding up the second story, and lay a plywood floor. | |
If you've got Quicktime loaded, you can view a 360 degree view of the empty garage (to compare with later.....). Click on the elongated thumbnail on right. | |
Here's the 5/8" plywood warping gracefully on the concrete floor, taken from the open garage door. I didn't treat the concrete, because it already had something resistant on it and I didn't want to go through the process of etching the floor in preparation of sealing it and painting it (I couldn't be sure I could wash the etching solution out of it thoroughly). I just laid down some 4 mil plastic sheeting to act as a vapor barrier, and then the ply on top of that. Two coats of light grey floor paint, and I'm ready to move in! | |
Cut to the scene a few days later in Manhattan, outside the Mini-Storage where our shop has been accumulating for a couple of years. GT Graphic Services were engaged to move the whole thing out to Connecticut. It took three days, and I won't bore you with the details. Here are a few snaps of the process (when it wasn't pouring with rain!). On the first day, we have our Ludlow and associated cabinets. | |
On the third day (the second it rained), we've got the Washington press on board, plus the remainder of the type cabinets and assorted extra stuff. | |
Ahhh, we're saying goodbye to the watertowers of Manhattan. | |
Here's the C&P getting rigged to the truck. Each item was tied very firmly to the bed of the truck - when I followed the truck home one night I was amazed at how rough the ride was. | |
A lesson learned? Spend more time preparing type, especially things in galleys. I lost a lot of type that spilled out of the flat side of galleys that weren't secured enough. | |
This truck is amazing - it goes up and down, of course, but it also swivels to get just the exact right angle to a loading dock or garage. This made unloading at ground level into my garage much easier than it would have been with a regular truck. | |
Greg Timko, the GT of GT Graphics, is supervising getting the relatively flimsy type cabinets locked onto the bed of the truck. | |
With enough straps, it becomes solid enough to travel over the bumps of the highways and byways. | |
I don't have any pictures of the load-in - I was too busy getting the stuff in place. Here is what it looked like as soon as it was done, before we start fixing it up into a working shop. I'm pleased with the amount of floor space we have, but there isn't enough working surface until I get more things put away. | |
I laid out the shop with the presses down the middle so it would be easy to get to all sides of them for maintenance. If anybody knows how to get the motor platform off the back of the C&P without pulling out the bottom axle, please let me know. |
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I put the composing table under the window (its covered up with hand made type cases at this point), and I'm going to put a shelf high up around the wall to hold things like the stereo, and little light things. I wish the Ludlow cabinets were flat topped - its a lot of waste space in a small shop. I'll probably build a flat top to span some of them later. | |
The extra type cabinets went into the converted workshop (converted to a composing room, of course). | |
Here's a 360 degree shot of what it looks like after we dropped everything on the floor and before it gets fixed up. Click on the elongated thumnail on left. | |
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