The brief
A letterpress restorer in southeast Portland had bought a 1962 cylinder press and needed it in Nagoya. The machine weighed just under two tonnes, stood 68 inches tall, and had almost all of its mass in the lower third with a projecting flywheel assembly near the top.
He had shipped a smaller press two years earlier in a crate built by somebody else. It arrived with a cracked side frame. That failure shaped the entire brief: he did not want a stronger crate so much as a crate that could not transfer shock into the frame.
Working out where the load goes
The first job on any build like this is finding the real load paths. We spent an afternoon with the customer identifying which parts of the casting were structural and which were decorative. Two machined pads on the base could take the entire weight; nothing else should take any.
That dictated the design: a heavy skid base with 4×4 runners, cradle blocking that only contacts those two pads, and a surrounding cleated plywood enclosure that carries no machine load at all. The crate holds the press in space rather than holding it up.
The flywheel problem
The projecting assembly near the top was the piece most likely to be damaged, and also the piece least able to take a clamping force. We built a separate internal cradle for it, lined with recycled closed-cell foam, braced diagonally back to the skid rather than to the crate walls.
This matters because crate walls flex. Anything braced to a wall gets whatever shock the wall receives. Anything braced to the skid stays with the mass.
Reuse content, stated on the quote
The skid runners and the base framing were new Douglas fir, because that is where the structural load lives and we will not guess on structure. The enclosure panels, cleats and internal blocking were salvaged — plywood from a machine crate that came through our yard, cleat stock from reclaimed decking.
Final reuse content: 58% by weight. We put that number on the quote because the customer cared, and because stating it holds us to it.
Testing and the part where we film it
Before the press went in, the empty crate was loaded with sandbags to four times the rated static weight, lifted from all four sides by forklift, stacked under a second loaded crate, and dropped four inches onto concrete. We film these tests and send the footage with the quote.
One joint failed the drop test on the first attempt. We rebuilt that corner with through-bolts instead of nails and it passed. That rebuild is exactly what prototyping is for.
Heat treatment, paperwork and arrival
The whole assembly was heat treated to 56 °C core for 30 minutes, stamped with our registered IPPC mark on two opposite sides, and documented with chart recorder data filed against the batch number.
The press arrived in Nagoya without a scratch. The customer sent a photograph of it running. That photograph is pinned up in the fabrication shop, which tells you something about what this part of the business is for.