Credit Card Machine Printing Press

I recently watched a video of Sarah Whorf making a printing press from a credit card knuckle buster.  I was immediately drawn to this as I used one for years in my pottery business. Back in the day I imprinted the cards on the paper/carbon receipts and took them to the bank. As time passed the banks would no longer take the slips and I had to telephone them in one at a time when I got home from a show. Next, when I finally got an electric machine on the landline in the gallery, I would bring the imprinted slips back from arts and craft shows and manually enter them into the machine. Of course, eventually I got a portable card reader to take credit card payments when on the road. 

I had that knuckle buster for years but finally threw it away.

Wow, when I saw this simple conversion to a printing press I was intrigued. So, I bought one on EBay and tried it out.

It worked great. I used different amounts of card shims depending on the thickness of the block. It worked with my rubber carved blocks, the cut our foam blocks and the lino blocks. I used Versafine Clair stamp pads on the first tests which worked fine for the rubber and foam but was not good enough for the lino. The next day I used the Caligo Safewash ink on the lino block and that worked much better.

If you want to make one of these watch Sarah’s video.Printing on Modified Credit Card Imprinters - Sarah Whorf