Printing Press Made From Ikea Furniture

Those planning to get married take note: real hackers print their own invitations on a press which they built. [Jenny] and [Charles] actually did this for printing the cover pages of their ceremony programs. They built their press using a chest of drawers from Ikea.

If you look closely you’ll see the printing plate is mounted on the back wall of the chest behind the drawer. This back wall has been reinforced with some plywood, and a second piece of plywood has been attached to the back side of the drawer. This second piece is actually hinged using steel pipe and a collection of fittings. When the six-foot tall hoop of pipe is drawn down it closes the drawer, hinging the piece of plywood holding the paper until it comes in contact with the printing plate. The size of the lever ensures the press will have enough force to produce a quality print.

They didn’t make a video of this process but after the break we have embedded a clip of the press on which this one was modeled.

[via Boing Boing]

12 thoughts on “Printing Press Made From Ikea Furniture

  1. Is there any particular advantage to pressing over say using a friend or employers laser printer? (Assuming you boss doesn’t mind, or you don’t get caught). Just curious! (Sorry if it’s explained in the video, I am currently without sound!

    1. There area couple of reasons, besides the obvious bragging rights, to press instead of digital print an invitation. The first one that comes to mind is the embossing effect you get when you press ink into heavy stock. You can’t get that effect from your average laser printer. There are a myriad of ink and embedded metallic leaf effects you can do on a press that you can’t do with a digital printer, but it didn’t look like they took advantage of those features on this project.

    2. No sound? Turn on the closed captions. In the event this builder said why I missed it, I assumed he wanted to do so. Many hacks are a leisure time activity, ans may be for in use of anther leisure time activity.

  2. Printing presses don’t have pixels, are cheaper per print(in large volumes), can use different inks, have a wider range of colors available, and can produce embossing or raised ink.

  3. Never thought of the embossed effect, definitely looks the business on prints. I wonder how accurate the press is in x and y for cropping afterward, ie could you crop 20 of them stacked and be within a fraction of a mm. Cheaper in large quantities yes, but not for a small run of invitations. Also isn’t the resolution significantly lower on the litho it’s 1×1 :-p

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