A clever method of using a Kensol or Kwikprint

A guy took a class from me a year or so ago, not that long after I acquired the Kensol.  He had used a Kensol in his job and showed me a clever way of aligning stamping on covers of book. It works equally well with a Kwikprint.  These pictures were taking using this method on the Kwikprint.

First you finish the cover on which you want to stamp and measure its thickness using a caliper.

Next you select a board (or lamination of boards) to equal the thickness of the cover.

Once you have that figured out, and it needs to be almost exactly the same thickness for this to work, you cut the non-covered piece so it's about the same size as the cover.

Now you put the board in the stamping machine (again, it works equally well for the Kwikprint and the Kensol) and tape a piece of mylar along the edge of the table.

Put the die or title in the machine and stamp it onto the mylar.

You'll end up with this.

One the cover you are stamping place a paper image of the die, or a line of paper or tape if you are doing a title (or really anything will work if it shows where on the cover you want the stamping to end up).

I'm using this example because the image on the die isn't in the proper orientation to the cover, which makes this a better example.  The image in the circle is upright (as shown on the mylar) but I want it to be slanted somewhat to the right.

To compensate for the alignment of the image on the die block I neeed to twist the cover until the mylar was seated directly over the paper image.  When it was I clamped the cover onto the table.

When it's all lined up and the book is clamped in position remove the mylar and stamp the cover.

It's a great technique and may be very well known but I had never seen it.  It's really fun to learn stuff like this from students.

Happy stamping.




Related posts on using the Kensol and Kwikprint can be found here:

Title stamping with a Kensol

Kensol vs. Kwikprint

Title stamping with a Kensol

As I posted earlier I bought my Kensol through an auction for around $275.

It was easy enough to die stamp, using the honeycomb chase that came with it. But when I started looking into doing multi-line stamping I was a bit shocked. It was going to cost me about four times the price of the machine to do some titling on books. I wasn’t interested.

To my understanding the method is to place type in these pallets:

These pallets are then placed into a chase:

I believe this is to allow for proper centering and alignment. But it also allowed for spending too much money, which didn’t interest me. You’d need one pallet for each line and then the chase to put them in. The ability to do five lines would be a bit over 750 bucks with shipping. And that would be for one font size. You’d really need a set for every size of type, to my understanding.

I’d stick with my Kwikprint for titling. It worked perfectly fine.

Then I started thinking about what they had used in Sweden. I looked through my pictures, but had never photographed their method for putting type in a chase. Still, it gave me an idea.

A block of aluminum isn’t all that expensive. I went to Grainger and found aluminum that would be the right size, and it was well under a hundred dollars. Around that time a friend came by and we were talking about it. He’s this insanely nice guy who seems to think that my problems are his problems.

He said he’d take some scrap aluminum he had and would mill it down to whatever dimensions I wanted. I wanted it the size of my dovetail mount, so about 5 x 8 inches.

This is what I ended up with. All I had to do was drill out and tap in a couple of screws to attach it to the dovetail.

To allow for full use, my friend milled the corners like this:

Then I went back to Grainger and bought aluminum to use as spacers and fillers, which I cut to size.

When it’s set up it looks like this. The key is to have enough spacers to even out the lengths of the lines. It also helps to put strips of paper along each line to even out any microscopic differences in the sizes of the type. If you don’t do that, letters will fall out. Lastly, you need to put pretty good pressure on the type or it will fall out. But not like Superman pressure. More like Lois Lane pressure.

I center the lines using a ruler, which seems like it would take forever but goes pretty quickly.

I have two thicknesses of spacers.

The thin one is .4 mm and I’ll often double or triple up on it and still not equal the thickness of the thicker spacer which is 1.6 mm.  

Obviously, you can line up the titling any way you want. There are many ways to do it. If I’m only doing one or two books, I’ll make up a piece of binder’s board and place it on the book where I want it. Then I’ll push the book until it just touches it on two sides, clamp the book down, and stamp. Works great, and is really quick.

This is aligning the type. It might look harder than it is.

I’m sure there are other ways to stamp multiple lines on a Kensol that don’t involve buying a dozen or so backbone pallets and a chase or two, but this way worked for me and for only a bit over $200 or so. A machinist could do this easily and for not much money, so that shouldn’t scare you off.

But, for me, figuring this out showed me that it’s nice to have friends. And Grainger.

Here is a post about a clever method of aligning stamping on a Kensol or Kwikprint.

Kensol vs. Kwikprint, a skirmish

About a year and a half ago I received a phone call. I'm a little ashamed that I'm always a bit surprised and a bit frustrated when the phone rings because so many are robo calls and I hate wasting time. And if they're not robo calls then they're sales calls and they're not much better, though I have been criticized for being too kind and polite to folks making sales calls. Which I am because I think their job must be awful and mine is perfect so I think I can afford to be gracious to them. Unless they won't listen to me, of course. Then I get a bit more surly and tell them I'm hanging up, but not before wishing them a nice day. (This sort of behavior is why I never quite fit in with Boston's culture.)

The voice on the end of this call basically said, "We are having an auction in Phoenix of bookbinding equipment and no one is bidding. You might be interested. Here is where you should look on the web." It was one of those perfect calls that benefits both parties.

I looked and they had lots of stuff that didn't interest me, but they did have a Kensol. That is a machine that heats type and dies for stamping titles and designs on books, if you don't know.

My method of stamping is a Kwikprint, of which I've posted a couple of videos on YouTube. (The newest one is here: http://tinyurl.com/huxgbeb ) The problem with the Kwikprint is that you can only stamp one line at a time (practically) and only stamp dies up to about 2 inches by 9 inches on my machine. Some Kwikprints won't even stamp dies half that size. And sometimes you want more capability than that.

The auction house didn't guarantee the Kensol was going to work so I limited my bid to $275, which I thought I could get back if it was non-working. I won the auction and drove up to Phoenix to pick it up. Someday I might post about my trip getting it back to Tucson, but I get a cold sweat just thinking about it. It was the scariest prolonged thing I've done.

It came on a blue metal table and weighed a lot. It had pneumatics hooked up to it.

I hooked up my air compressor from my nailers to it to see what would happen. It worked!

The pneumatics are not at all necessary but can be convenient in that they control how long of a dwell the machine uses (how long the die or type will touch the cover when stamping) and you can also regulate how deep of an impression it makes. When using the pneumatics all the impressions will be exactly the same, which wouldn't be the case if done by hand.

In order to stamp by hand, I bought some pipe at Home Depot and used a bench grinder to take down the end so that it would fit in the machine. I made handles that were 3 and 5 feet. In the midst of this clutter, you can see the ground-down end of the pipe.

In the end the pneumatics were a problem because the timer didn't work right. It can be replaced for a few hundred dollars, though a friend says he can use a converted timer from something else for much less. I believe him but haven't had the time to look into it yet.

Other than that it works perfectly. I could remove the pneumatics but don't want to. Yet.

Eventually I made a table for it. As I said it weighs A LOT. While building the house, the one thing I was never all that good at is using a circular saw, so I decided to make this using only that saw and pocket screws. We like to challenge ourselves, don't we? Diane went off to Boston for a couple of weeks last year so I did it over a weekend. Surprisingly all the cuts were straight. Sometimes getting away from something is all it takes to get better at it.

Because the Kensol weighs so much I built the table around the blue metal stand that it came on. There are a lot of peripheral items with this, and it's nice to have places to store them. Plus with the old table, things were constantly falling on the floor.

You can compare it to the Kwikprint:

To me the Kwikprint is a car and the Kensol is a truck. Not a semi truck but like a large pickup. Not as nimble—takes a bit longer to set up—but it can generate much more force and can do larger things easily. All those things are very, very good but not necessary on every project. 

If I just need a line or two. I'll use the Kwikprint every time. If I'm doing many lines on many books, I'll take the time to use the Kensol.

This last photo shows the area that can be used on each machine. The honeycomb metal is about 5 x 8 and fits the Kensol, the smaller metal above it shows what can be stamped using the Kwikprint, which is significantly smaller.

But even if a die or type is placed within that area of the Kwikprint, you can have real trouble getting an impression because of the inability to put enough down force on it. So the real useful space on the Kwikprint is probably half the size shown here.

Still, I love my Kwikprint.

I'm going to do two posts in the future about the Kensol. One is a way to use it to stamp multiple lines without going bankrupt buying chases. The other is a way to line up the stamping in a simple, quick and effective way—which will also work on the Kwikprint.

It's funny that a used Kensol can be bought for less than the Kwikprint. Probably because of the size and space requirement and because fewer folks know how to use it.  All those things add up to the Kensol being less useful as a hobby machine. But worth searching out I think.

They're out there.

See also:  http://singleflexible.blogspot.com/2016/10/a-clever-method-of-using-kensol-or.html
and: http://singleflexible.blogspot.com/2016/08/title-stamping-with-kensol.html

Kwikprint

Here is my third video, on how I use the Kwikprint.

You can also find this video on my second web site:

www.book-conservation.com

Enjoy!