Now with more Huff and Puff

After almost a year (!) of dragging our feet, we finally settled down and called up the electricians.

The friendly guys over at Duhon Electric here in Austin swept in and wired up our studio space with 220 volts of pure, printing power. Just listen to those puppies wheeze!

The tricky thing with moving a pair of industrial presses like the Kluges into a shop is that many of the original motor system run on 3-phase power and lack traditional plugs. The majority have to be wired directly into a breaker, which can entail a lot of additional work for the home printer. Some devices can help you get the power you need, such as a rotary power converter, which uses capacitors to “step up” household current to a higher voltage. Don’t let a piece of valuable equipment go to the scrapyard just because you’re unfamiliar with the wiring!

The huffing and puffing is the sound of the Kluge’s vacuum pump, which powers the automatic feeder. The generated vacuum allows the operator to run a job without risking a limb in the maw of the beast, as paper is delivered to the platen for impression by grippers. The resulting print is then safely removed from the press by a second gripper to make room for the next sheet. The whole thing is very Rube Goldberg.

Our first project on the Kluges should be coming up soon!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 7:58 pm and is filed under News and tagged with electric, hook up, kluge, motor, press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.