A YouTuber called This Designed That built a fully functional hand-cranked etching press from scratch, and it prints clean enough to hand out on a street corner.
The press uses two steel rollers to squeeze an inked etching plate and paper together on a platen. The top roller is sourced from an off-cut of steel pipe, turned down on a lathe to achieve a consistent radius and smooth surface finish. Nearly everything is hand-machined. The only exceptions are off-the-shelf bearings and the yellow side plates, which were outsourced to a CNC shop. The rollers are chain-driven off a separate driveshaft, keeping the crank mechanism clean and the drive load distributed.
The build video shows the press running and producing actual prints, which is what separates this from a shop exercise. This Designed That has prior form here: a DIY proofing press from 2021 and a resin-based hot foil stamping rig from 2023 share obvious lineage with this machine. Read the full piece to see how the pipe roller choice and the chain drive arrangement solve problems most home machinists would not think to anticipate.
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