Make Paper - Pressing the Paper

Gretchen Schermerhorn: Hi, I am Gretchen and I am at Pyramid Atlantic and today we are making paper by hand. In this clip, I am going to show you how to take your post and load it into the jack. Now what you want to do is easily lift up your post and slide it into the jack. You want to put as many boards as you can on top of that to fill up the space that's in between your post and the top platen of the jack. Then slowly start cranking it down. Keep cranking, keep cranking, you will see water going all over the floor and keep going. You wait about 10-15 minutes till it all stops dripping. Then you take it out and then you are going to load it into the drying box which we will discuss later, but what if you don't have a jack? I will show you what you can do instead. But what if we don't have a jack? Well, I am going to show you something that you can do instead. You will just leave your post with a felt on top of it just like this and you will get another board in similar size and just put it right on top. Make sure it is on a table that can support quite a bit of weight. The next thing you will do is you are going to take those buckets that we were using earlier, these five gallon buckets and you will just place them right on top. Now what you are going to do is you are going to fill them up with water and you are going to actually let this stand overnight because you don't have as much pressure as you did in the jack. So longer pressing, less weight. So in the next clip, I am going to show you how to take your damp papers out of the jack and load it into the paper drying box.