Gamewell Press Blog

I got got got got no time

It's funny how things go sometimes. I just got that beautiful Pearl (well it's been a month now), and all I wanted to do was play around with it, but that's not how it worked out. Instead, all sorts of great but busy-making things have been happening, like planning a children's book, and having to suddenly seriously think about what my prices are/would be after receiving multiple random quote requests. I'm not a planner, but I'm trying to become better. I also declared myself the sole proprietor of Gamewell Press by filing a "doing business as" form. Did you know that until I filed that form Gamewell Press was an illegal alias and every time I mentioned my press, Gamewell Press, I was committing fraud? I'm pretty sure that for me at least, it's a crime on par with having a beer on the stoop or jaywalking, but the legalese on the website that explains everything made it sound like I was Al Capone. So that was kind of cool and I walked around for a few days alternately whispering "Gamewell Press" out of the side of my mouth and elbowing Glendon in the ribs to "keep it quiet, ya hear?" or referring to it as the press that dare not speak its name.

The main activity that's been sucking away all of my time and preventing me from blogging is a web design class I'm taking. The class runs for three hours twice a week (after work) for four weeks, and the last class is tomorrow. It's been really great, and I'm well on my way to building a website, but it's been a lot of work in a short period. Also after spending so much time looking at other websites and messing with Dreamweaver, the last thing I want to do is go back to the computer and blog. I'll be back fairly soon, but I wanted to give a reason for my absence and post a sneak peak of my website to be.

Say Hello to My (Not So) Little Friend

Yes, that's right, I've pretty much officially lost my mind. I got a Pearl! Specifically a Pearl Improved #11. Now I know what you're thinking, and I know this because EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know has said the same thing the last few days. Yes, that does mean I have three presses right now. Yes, I do have a 200 square foot apartment. No, I did not get rid of the couch. I got rid of a dresser. Yes, that's right, it's in my bedroom.

Yeah, I'm a bit defensive, but seriously I've said this thirty times. And I know it's not ideal and of course I didn't plan to have three presses at once, but you can't always plan these things. I never actually meant to get the 6x10 Kelsey, but it kind of fell in my lap - you can't turn that down! I've been kind of lax in selling the 5x8 Kelsey because I've been using its roller springs on my 6x10 until the new ones come in, and also, it's my first press and it's pretty. I've been passively looking for a Pearl for a while and this one was in New York City. How often does that happen?

I'm probably also a little touchy because this purchase has kind of scared the shit out of me. This is a big press (relatively) and a big change for me (and I really loved that dresser). I do think it's the next logical step in my growth as a printer and I've pretty much decided that I would like to make some money off this someday. It would be nice to be a part-time librarian and part-time printer (of course, this is talking long term). But it's a step I've been wary of taking. To that end, I've been keeping my eyes open for Pearls and other small treadle presses, but I never placed an ad seeking one or otherwise actively looked. I've had a few leads and near misses, and each time it didn't work out, I was a tiny bit relieved. But I've also been wrestling with my jealousy over newbie questions on Briar Press from new Pearl owners. I'll read the questions and part of me will think, "Pick up a copy of General Printing for god's sake! Take a class before operating 500 pounds of machinery, dear god! You don't deserve a Pearl, sob, sniffle. Oh, why can't I have a Pearl? Sob." And then I would slap myself for being so catty and remind myself that I could always start actively looking for a Pearl.

Sorry, but I did not take pictures of the move because I had this superstitious idea that if I brought my camera something would go very very wrong. Thankfully everything went fine. I know a wonderful guy, Jony, who owns a moving company, JP Carrier, Inc., and he gave me a good deal on his muscle and expertise, truck with a lift gate, hand truck, fancy straps/ropes, etc. On the seller's end, Glendon and the seller helped Jony, and back in Brooklyn, I recruited my friend Ben and my neighbor David. Since my upper body strength is a joke, my role was mainly carrying typecases that came with the press and wringing my hands. We decided not to remove the press from the base mostly on John Barrett's advice, and the fact that this is a smaller press, relatively.

What we did was pretty basic. We removed the flywheel, feedboards and ink disk and tied the platen closed. Then we strapped the press onto a hand truck (with me moaning that the press is extremely top heavy! Extremely! Top-heavy!) and Glendon and the seller helped Jony (who might be the strongest person ever) tilt the hand truck back. The seller's building has a ramp, so he just wheeled it (with Glendon spotting him) down to the street and onto the lift gate. Jony and Glendon held it while it was lifted up and into the truck. We packed blankets all around it and secured it to bars running along the truck with those special movers straps that have those adjustable winch-like things. After that, the press was actually resting on its back legs which seriously freaked me out, but everyone thought it would be fine. And it was though it still freaks me out to think about it. Then we drove from Morningside Heights to Clinton Hill and I cursed this pothole ridden city and composed angry letters to transportation officials in my head. Seriously, New York City streets are awful. We did so much bouncing around that I was SURE that the press couldn't have made it unscathed. By the time we pulled up at my house, I was literally positive and trying to resign myself to it being broken in some way, but it was just fine. We put the press back on the hand truck and took it down the lift gate off the truck and then we were faced with the five steps up to my apartment building's front door. Of course when I say "we," I mostly mean Jony and Glendon. Each of the four guys took a corner and I held the doors and they pulled/pushed the press on the hand truck up the stairs, though the hall and into my apartment. Then we had to wiggle it down the hall to my bedroom and maneuver it onto its new wood base (don't worry - we examined the beams, etc. under the floor). So that's how it happened and it went swimmingly. I would not want to move a bigger press than that though, and I'm pretty sure I won't ever have to since the apartment is at maximum capacity.

Apparently that old adage about when it rains, it pours is true. I bought the Pearl two weeks ago, and then we went to Louisville for that wedding, and while we were there, I saw an ad for a Pearl in Louisville, KY on Briar Press. I totally could have rented a UHaul and taken it home. Kind of funny. And to top things off, Elisabeth made the nicest offer ever of one of her Pearls that she's de-accessioning. So maybe now when people comment on my three presses, I should just say that I'm proud of myself for not having five.

So I haven't yet printed with the Pearl since it had some issues I needed to take care of and it came with some other stuff that I'm trying to organize to sell with the 5x8 Kelsey (which dear god, I need to get out of my tiny house!). And we went to Louisville (which is really nice - you should go) and I finally quit my second (part-time) job, and basically I've been doing that stupid thing I sometimes do where I want everything to be perfect. But when I do print, you peoples will be the first to know - and care.

PEARL!

Dueling Wedding Invitations, Part Two

Sorry for the delay in posting part two of the dueling wedding invitations (click here for Part One); it's taken me some time to want to look at these guys again. They were such an ordeal to print in many ways, and I wasn't as happy with the whole thing as I had hoped I'd be. This was the last project printed on the 5x8 Kelsey and then a week later I brought home the 6x10 press and spent two weeks messing around with it before finally printing my business cards. I think I needed to print those cards and be super happy with them before I could step back and think about all the things that either went wrong or I did wrong with these invites.

Below is the finished product, which in some moments I do like. They're probably not everyone's cup of tea since they're brighter and maybe more casual than the standard wedding invitation, but I think they fit the tone of the couple and their upcoming wedding pretty well. John and Alissa are having a casual (for a wedding), summery wedding in Louisville, Kentucky over Memorial Day weekend, and I do think the invitation conveys that. My main problems with it are that it doesn't look as polished as I would have liked - I just couldn't get certain things to print perfectly and while the design isn't elegant, I still kind of wanted it to look elegant (because I'm bonkers). It looks handmade, which actually pleased the bride and groom, but ironically upsets me. Obviously I'm still having trouble evaluating this printing job, so let's just move onto the process, shall we?

So everything in the invitation except the trellis border is handset metal type, and the trellis is a stereotype mounted on wood. I'm sure you know that it's best to place the type in the chase with the lines of text running parallel to the top and bottom of the chase so that when the platen closes, pressure is applied evenly along the entire line of text and the line prints evenly. If you set the type so that a line of text runs parallel to the sides of the chase, the pressure might not be applied at the same time or quite as evenly since a clamshell press, by necessity, closes from the bottom to the top.

Naturally I try to follow that principle while printing, and at first tried on these too. Since the chase is only 5 inches tall from top to bottom, I had to print the text in two sections and the ornaments in two other sections and finally the trellis. That made 5 print runs, yikes. I had kind of accepted that when I noticed that the lines of text were not straight in the proofs, and it took me a very long time to figure out why, mainly because I didn't want to admit it to myself. Each text section was lined up nice and straight when I printed it (I promise - I measured 40-zillion times), but they were zigging and zagging towards each other when you examined the proof sheet. Because of the chase size and paper size, I was lining up the first text section to the top of the paper and the second text section to the bottom of the paper. The paper wasn't cut straight (thanks, incompetent Staples), so using two different straight edges wasn't lining everything up. I'm used to my paper-cutting being a bit unreliable (at some point I really need to face facts and find some sort of paper cutter), but I expected a bit more from Staples, with their fancy laser cutting. But, hey look! At least I've finally got ink mixing down!

  

So I finally faced facts, threw the ruler across the apartment with a curse, and set about the business of making sure each print run lined up with one edge, THE SAME EDGE, of the paper (the trellis edge). Unfortunately for me, this required resetting or at least repositioning pretty much every line. I'd taken care of much of my layout in the composing stick, and the shift needed to reposition lines running from 8 inches to 5 inches was large enough that I couldn't just turn the chase and rearrange the furniture. (Just as an aside, it's dumb-ass mistakes like this that led me to start this blog. Sure the idea of using a common edge for alignment seems obvious now that you've read it, but really was it before? Not to me, apparently. Now it is, and just in case this lesson hasn't been seared into my brain, I now have it recorded on the Internet for future reference.)

Somewhere in that process I got confused about my print runs - or at least that's my only explanation now. My notes are unclear, and as it was probably late at night, my memory is fuzzy. As you can see, I printed half the Della Robbia text first. Why? I'm not sure. I believe (and this is reconstruction) that I meant to print that portion of the text and the couple's names (in Gallia) in one run and the remainder of the text in the 2nd run, but that may not be true. If that was my intention, I can certainly explain why that didn't happen: the Gallia printed very badly. So I think that I decided that I didn't have enough ink for the Gallia but adding ink would cause over-inking of the Della Robbia. I was wrong, but I didn't know that yet. So the question now is, if I removed the Gallia, why didn't I add the rest of the Della Robbia text, and just print that all in one run? I don't have the answer for that, except perhaps that I was extremely frustrated and tired from an already long evening of resetting everything and discovering that the Gallia wasn't printing well. Regardless, that was stupid and added a whole extra print run and alignment headache. Now we're back at 5 print runs (3 text, 2 ornament). Ah, hindsight, etc.

So I printed the first section of Della Robbia separately and it went fine - it even looked pretty, with a nice kiss impression. Since I already had the press inked up and that had gone so well, I decided to give the Gallia a shot (this is still the first night of printing, just very late that night). Hubris. (Yeah that's right, this is an epic battle). My original idea was to print all the Gallia in one go, and since it's a heavier font than Della Robbia, I added more ink and I think removed a sheet of packing. The print was splotchy and uneven. I decided that I would go to bed and that the next night I would split the two sections up into two print runs. For those of you keeping track at home, that makes six print runs now, and let's keep in mind that each separate run entails a ridiculous amount of measuring and fiddling to make sure everything is aligned and straight.

The next evening I inked up again and tried to print the names only. Still no good. I added ink, I subtracted ink, I added packing, I subtracted packing. I briefly hyperventilated. Seriously though, I messed with this for hours. I examined each piece of type and did loads of spot makeready, mostly without success. I believe I had the tympan sheet, the makeready sheet, the press board, a piece of Lettra and three piece of card stock as packing and it really was pretty much perfect. I was getting just the right impression (a kiss), which I think you can even see in the below picture, but the printing was still blotchy. With the impression taken care of, I decided that the ink must be the problem, but soon ruled that out as well. I suppose that inking the Gallia isn't completely straightforward since there is both line and (a small) solid in the font, but I'm pretty sure I had more than enough ink on the press. At some points the ink was filling in the white space between the lines (see the I and last S in the bride's name) while still printing splotchily in other places (see the K in the groom's name). I did loads of makeready and it didn't help. I cleaned and examined the type before re-inking and that didn't help. I tested this two days in a row, so the press was cleaned in between, and while I used the same ink mix, I also used that ink mix to print the Della Robbia. Why did it print so badly? I'm still not really sure. 

 

My best guess is the paper wasn't taking the ink well from the type, but I don't really see what was so different about this situation than any other printing situation where this didn't happen. I was using Crane's Lettra, mainly because it probably is the paper I'm most familiar with, so we decided to use Lettra since much of the rest of the invitation was a new experience so why invite more trouble? So still, I'm unclear what the problem was.

Finally, late that 2nd night, I decided that I would have to dampen the paper. I had been reluctant to do this because I had already printed on the paper and I still had a few more print runs to go, so dampening the entire sheet seemed really problematic. The only other time I've printed on dampened paper, it was a small, one-run print job and I put 4 sheets of paper in a Tupperware container, dipped the fifth sheet of paper in water, laid it on top of the four sheets and repeated the process with the rest of the stack. I then let the stack sit closed overnight. Obviously I had no time to do that in this case and the idea of dipping my printed on sheet into a tub of water made me nervous.

So I devised the only stop-gap measure I could think of. I got a container of water and a sponge and spot-dampened the middle of each page where I would then print. I tried to print all the Gallia at once, but it actually still worked better in two sections, so I just printed the names that night. As you might imagine, individually dampening each sheet took a while and I couldn't do them all at once or they would dry before I printed them. It also took some experimentation to figure out how much to dampen. Finally I worked out a system where I would dampen 4 sheets and print them and then do four more. After about 25 I would stack them up and put them in the book press. When I was finally finished I left them all in the book press overnight and collapsed into bed. The next evening I repeated these steps for the 2nd section of Gallia and I also printed the 2nd section of Della Robbia. Between spot-dampening and then doing two runs of about 110 sheets with a hand-cranked press, it was a long evening. Let me tell you, after those three nights of difficult printing, I would be happy to never see that shade of blue again.

Voila, the text was finally done, and it looked mostly acceptable. The Gallia wasn't perfect and though I sound like a broken record, I still don't know why exactly. I've printed with it before without problems, I examined each piece pretty closely, but who knows? I'll do further tests at some point but haven't yet had the time or energy. To be honest, I just had to look at the time I had left and accept imperfection (although being honest, it's pretty obvious that I haven't accepted imperfection). The really annoying thing was actually something else (it just never ends). Though I had spent hours on alignment, the text still looked crooked. It wasn't crooked, but it looked crooked. I measured with my pica ruler, I tested with a triangle and the text was all perfectly aligned with the trellis edge, but due to the white space left by using both 24pt and 14pt Gallia, some of the text looked crooked. Since attaching a slip of paper explaining that this was just a visual trick wasn't an option, I decided to just take comfort in my measurements and hope that no one else would pay attention.

Elisabeth will maybe be proud of me after looking at the above picture. After seeing the frog business cards I printed (in two parts) last August, she commented that I could be pushing the press further and she was right. As you can see from this lockup, I printed that same frog, but this time printed two other elements and utilized most of the chase. I think if one compares the two prints, the newest one, with the larger print area, actually printed much better. Look at me growing. Perhaps there is hope yet? With the frog and the flowers, I really didn't have to do anything special to make it print well, so that was quite a relief. After all the problems I'd had with the text section, I had left myself only one evening to print all the green elements, including the envelopes.

Lots and lots of late nights with these guys, but that last night was the worst. I literally stayed up until 9:30 in the morning and then woke up at 11:40 to go to work (paying work) from 1-9. So obviously one of my issues was time management. As you may have read in my previous post on these invitations, it took us longer than expected to finalize the design, and once we were done, I procrastinated for a couple days because it was my birthday and I was tired of these invites and then I got crawl-around-on-the-floor sick for a few days, and by that time I only had about 4 days left to print everything. That may sound like plenty of time, and if everything had gone smoothly it would have been perfect. Of course, things went wrong, and I'm no expert, so 4 days was really, really pushing it. To be honest, I don't know if it would have turned out any better if I'd had more time. Maybe if I had decided to throw the whole thing out and start over, but I don't have that kind of money or patience.

The trellis was the final challenge, and its printing badly was purely my amateur fault. The trellis is actually two different pieces that I bought on EBay ages ago. They don't really fit together all that naturally, as you can see in the invitation, but that was unavoidable and I had originally planned for the invitation to be smaller and to only use the larger trellis piece. Anyway the trellis looked a little weird at the meeting point to begin with and parts of both pieces required some pretty complicated makeready, but I mostly got the job done. If you can believe it, I even spot dampened it too, just in case. If you look at the finished invitation however, you will notice a small area right in the center (yes, of course it would be the center!) that still didn't print, even with all my ministrations. That, ladies and gentlemen, is where the block just slopes downward. SLOPES! I did everything I could, underlays and overlays, and it does look better than the first prints, but there was just no way to print something that didn't exist. Why, oh why did I not notice that before? I could have just cut off the whole edge. It was a silly mistake, but now I know the value of carefully proofing all new materials!

 

And that is the saga of those invitations. If anyone has any ideas about any of the problems I experienced, I'd be thrilled to hear them. Also has anyone printed with French Paper? If so, please describe both which you used and the results.

All right, the duel is over. But it wasn't really a duel, I guess. Both are still standing (in that they please the brides and grooms) and now again so am I.

Pictoral Ode to Builder Boyfriend on His Birthday

I've written about my boyfriend, Glendon, every once in a while on this blog. I'm not particularly (okay, at all) mechanically or building inclined, and he's always had a knack for that sort of thing, so he often helps me out - sometimes more willingly than others. Usually you catch glimpses of him lifting and carrying, fiddling and jimmying, and of course, building. Since today is his birthday, I wanted to post pictures of all the amazing things he's made for me since I seriously got into printing. Without his knowledge and help, I would have spent a lot more money and a lot more time trying to set up my little shop. I just want to thank him a million times for all his help and patience.

First and foremost, my beautiful type cabinet slash work surface. I love this thing, and as I've mentioned, it holds any size 2/3 case (quite a feat).

A couple months after that, he built me a snazzy type sorting tray. He even got school credit for this! Since I think I'll probably be sorting type until I die, it comes in quite handy.

This is my book press. Without this, no one would have gotten Christmas presents. Not only do I use it for making book covers, it is also handy for notepads and flattening paper.

You might think this is silly, but it was Glendon's idea to put these nails up for the composing stick and quoin keys. I would not have immediately thought of this, and it saves so much room and is very convenient. This is really indicative of how Glendon helps me (and perhaps how I help him?). I think we approach problems differently, so sometimes we can really help each other just by pointing out what is, to each of us, obvious.

Yes, I'm capable of putting up shelves, but I don't want to and he doesn't mind (and honestly I once had three of them fall of the wall 6 months after I put them up so perhaps I'm not capable of putting them up after all). Also, they were originally positioned differently, but I had to move them when I put the cabinet and press in that corner, and my neighbor, Carrie, and I tried to move them and could not get those stupid black things back in the slots - oh my god that was maddening. Anyway, when Glendon got back in town, he did it. It was awesome.

This is my mini furniture cabinet. I don't actually have room or need for a full sized cabinet, but I needed something to hold all the furniture I do have.I had been storing it and leading in 2 galleys (which is how you buy them from Letterpress Things), but when I got a third galley's worth, I realized that it was getting ridiculous. They weren't accessible and blech. So I bought this very small square shelf from John for $4, and Glendon cut it diagonally to make it look and act like a traditional cabinet. This is the type of thing Glendon does that just makes things easier for me. The original plan was for me to stuff it with foam so as to have the different lengths of furniture all fit the same way. That would have worked fine, but it would have been a pain and the case still wouldn't have fit on my bookshelf. This way is so much better.

This may seem a bit counter-intuitive - showing all the things Glendon has given me on his birthday, when he should be getting all the presents, but oh well. One of my presents to him is my gratitude and also bragging about his awesomeness. So thank you, Glendon. Happy Birthday! I'm glad you were born. Um, can you help me reattach my gripper spring after we eat cake??

Back in Business

 

My alternate title could be "it works!" I know my blogging time-line isn't matching up to real life very well right now, and hopefully I'll blog myself into the present fairly soon, but today I'm going to jump a couple weeks back from the real present and three weeks forward from the blogging present. Confused?

So I brought the press home in mid-March and then spent two or three weeks cleaning and reorganizing my shop area and the press itself. The press still had some rust on it that I needed to get off and I was having endless trouble with the roller hooks and springs. I'll talk about all that plus setting the platen and roller height in upcoming posts, but I just wanted to shout from the rooftops how pleased I am that the new press and the honeycomb base both work!

 Yes, I finally printed something on the new (to me) 6x10 Kelsey Excelsior. It went so very well, and those two weeks of messing around with various bits and pieces of the press really paid off. I basically popped in my plate and printed perfectly right off the bat. No makeready, the packing was perfect already, I added just the right amount of ink - it was like a dream. Some of you know how rare that can be in printing, and I have to say that I really needed it. After those wedding invitations that were such a challenge that I personally still can't look at them objectively, and then all the futzing I had to do to get the rollers to work properly on the 6x10, and the complete lack of any printing for weeks, it was heartening and a bit of an ego boost to have this first small project run so smoothly.

Not only was this my first time using the Kelsey 6x10, it was also my first use of the honeycomb base, and it also went well, with just a few minor issues. I bought the honeycomb base for super cheap on EBay about 8 months ago, but I hadn't ever used it. This is because Owosso gives first time customers a free plate, either copper or magnesium. Since copper is longer lasting but also so much more expensive than magnesium, I thought I'd get the business card that my sister designed made into a copper plate, and that would be my free plate.

Now as I said, the base and toggle hooks cost very little, so I went ahead and bought them even though I really didn't know anything about how this system is supposed to work or how to lock it up. It was so cheap that it was worth the money to give it a shot even if it didn't work and I eventually had to spend the big bucks for a polymer base system or the new honeycomb bases that NA Graphics sell. My design was finalized around Christmas and when I finally went to Owosso's website, I realized that copper plates are not offered in the height that my base needs. Owosso offers 16 gauge (.064") or ¼ inch (.250") plates in copper and neither of those sounded right. After a little more research and measuring I learned that many bases are .668" for mounting the ¼ inch, .250" plates, whereas mine is .759" and takes 11 point plates. 11 point plates are only made (for letterpress) in magnesium. This kind of worried me and I was concerned that maybe my plate depth wasn't as good as the thinner one. (As an aside, I later found out that Joie Studio uses a honeycomb base the same depth as mine, so that was reassuring). I actually looked into getting the plate machined down, but it turned out that grinding it down would be better and either way it would cost more than $200, making it equally as expensive as a new plate system. Anyway all that dithering took a while but I finally decided that I might as well take advantage of the free plate offer and give my base a try - if it didn't work I'd only be out shipping costs. So I sent in my Illustrator file with instructions to cut the plate into three separate plates (all for free! Thank you Owosso customer service!) and bevel the edges (so as to attach the hooks to the base).

The plate arrived but my troubles were not yet over, oh no. In the above picture, you can see my honeycomb base, which is actually 2 pieces that fit together into a rectangle (in the picture at the top of this post, you can see the base locked into a rectangle in the chase). You can also see the toggle hooks and key that came with the base. Yeah, those didn't work. I couldn't get two of my three plates to lock up tightly enough and the one that was tight only locked up with strategic placement of the plate against the holes. This was a couple days before I went to John Barrett's to pick up the Kelsey, so I just took everything along with me to get his instruction. It turns out that there are two main kinds of bases, Blatchford and Sterling, and three sizes of holes between them, 5/16", 7/16", and 1/2". My plate is a Sterling plate with 7/16" holes, but my toggle hooks were for a Blatchford base with 5/16" holes. At least the problem was explained, but John only had a couple of the toggle hooks I needed and didn't want to sell them to me since he quite obviously needs the few he has for demonstrations to neophytes like me.

I'm really not sure why there is so little information on honeycomb bases out there (by which I mean the internet; I didn't actually do real book research or anything). If anyone knows of good sources for instruction or history, please let me know and I'll post links or summaries. So I contacted Fritz at NA Graphics, but it seems that the Sterling bases and hooks he sells use the half inch system. Then I contacted Dave Churchman and Don Black (well Craig Black - I believe Don is in Florida). I was able to get a few from Craig Black in four of the six widths. In the above picture and on NA Graphics, you can see that the toggle hooks come in different widths or thicknesses so that you can attach the plate to the base depending on the space left between the plate and the edge of the hole. From him I got a 00, a 0, two 1s, and a 2. I can attach most everything with these, but I didn't want a couple more in each size for greater flexibility and the 1s and 0s are the ones I use most. 

 

I printed the business cards using the ones from Canada, but I bought a few more from Dave Churchman when I was in Indianapolis this weekend. I always seem to do things the difficult way and this size Sterling base is right in keeping with that. Dave has boxes of Blatchford bases in different sizes and multiple coffee cans full of the 5/16" toggle hooks that go with them, but only an envelope full of the Sterling 7/16" toggle hooks. I bought a few, and I think I can now lock up pretty much anything, but I didn't want to be greedy and buy lots of the hooks because I'm sure there are a few other people needing some too. However, if you are looking into purchasing a used base system, may I recommend the Blatchford base with 5/16" toggle hooks? You will have many, many more purchasing options. So far I quite like printing with the honeycomb base; it seems just like printing with wood mounted plates except that there's less to store. Really I'm just happy to be printing again.