As part of the maintenance of the press that I purchased, I needed to clean and grease the outrigger wheels on the outrigger (extending arms that hold the press bed). This brand of press uses wheels instead of bearings - most other presses use bearings.  

It does not have horizontal bearings like the bigger presses, so later I’m going to attach ¾ in. UHMW strips to the press bed as a substitute. I think some table top presses attach blocks of this to the sides to help keep the size small (and probably price too). You can put these in narrow areas that heavy  bearings won’t fit. 

There were two outriggers that I had to maintain: one for each side of the press. Most of the outrigger wheels would barely rotate or were jammed. As a result, I took all of the wheels off, cleaned them up, put on grease, and then put them back on the outrigger. While I was taking off the wheels, it was clear that the lubricant was dried and a lot of junk had to be cleared out. One of the wheels was so stuck that the bearing tube came out of the wheel but wouldn’t come off the outrigger (see photos). Two tools that helped a lot were wire brushes for cleaning and the convertible retaining ring pliers for those little rings.  

The video below shows how badly the wheels needed to be cleaned. The press would barely work if they weren’t cleaned but I thought it best to clean them and then I wouldn’t have to touch them again for a long time. This wasn’t difficult to do, just time consuming.

Outrigger Stands

Since the press folds up for transport, I designed a mobile press stand that would fit through a residential doorway. The outriggers fold up (after you take out the press bed of course). To make up for the narrow stand, I made adjustable platforms for the outriggers. I’ll show more in a later post. 

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