epossum
Member
Here are a few thoughts on commercially available pen presses. In a nutshell, don't waste your money buying one. I just trashed the second one I bought. Both failed in the same exact way - the bracket that the press ram goes through bent backwards. (see photo in my album in Miscellaneous) This forces the ram to rise well above centerline. I had two different suppliers version of these presses; unfortuantely they both had the same press ram, handle and linkage mechanism. All it takes to bend one of these pieces of junk is to apply just a tad too much pressure. A part that is slightly larger than it should be easily causes the amount of force you apply to the press handle to go over the limit when trying to press into the pen tube. When that happens the bracket bends and your press is history. You can bend the bracket back down but once bent it is going to bend again every time you try to press pen parts together. Can it be fixed so it won't happen again? Probably, if you have a welder of some kind and can cut some steel gussets to weld on the bracket. Unfortunately I don't have a welder and can't try fixing one of these presses this way. So what can you do? I can't really say yet, but what I'm going to do is get an arbor press. Once I receive it and have a chance to try it I'll post the results if anyone is interested. If you already know about arbor presses and would like to get one I can point you to Enco. They have a lot of good stuff. The web address is use-enco.com - visit and check out their stuff.