Thursday, September 6, 2007

Fun with Rollers!

You know, I've had a fairly easy time with my presses thus far (I can't believe I'm in the multiple!), because most of the "fixing up" that I have needed to do have centered around recovering the rollers and cleaning off the grime. I need to get a spring and replace a belt on the motor of the Golding Pearl, but even without those fixes, the press runs without much issue.

The rollers will generally be one thing that will always need to be dealt with when buying these kinds of presses. Generally rollers over the course of time degrade, shrink, swell, get warped, melt off, or something. I'm glad I found Adrian and Jane at Ramco Roller in San Dimas, who not only have great prices for rubber rollers, but have pretty fast turnaround and are genuinely nice people. I just brought them the old crusty composition rollers and the roller trucks from the Pearl, and Adrian said that he'd get them back to me early next week. The trucks are needed because Adrian makes the rollers based on the size of the trucks. This is especially important if you don't have the original specifications on what diameter the rollers should be. Adrian cleans off the roller cores (the metal rod the roller sits on), puts rubber on them, and then hand grinds them down to size. He will drill a hole on both sides of the roller core if needed so the roller can be put on the machine. I know from experience that some other roller makers won't do this for you if you want to switch from composition to rubber, so this saves on the expense of buying new roller cores!

Ramco does not have a website yet, but their phone number is in the right sidebar, and you can also e-mail Adrian at adrianramco[at]yahoo.com. Here are the prices that Adrian gave me as of today:

(by length, up to 1.5" in diameter)
0-6" $35
6-10" $45
10-20" $55
20-30" $65

1.5" - 2" diameter, add $10.

Tell them Tina sent you!

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