Progress!
We were planing to build this design of tile press that we found in the book Handmade Tiles by Frank Giorgini. But this one is cooler and has more power. It’s a 12 ton shop press from Harbor Freight Tools. The Giorgini press would cost at least $80 to build and take a good day of work maybe two. This bad boy was $100 on sale and took me a half hour to set up. It has the capability to turn your plaster molds to dust, plus if you ever need to press some bearings or U joints on your vehicle you’re good to go. All I had to do was add the press plates. The top one is two sheet of 3/4″ CDX plywood glued and screwed together. Then I attached a 1″ pipe flange and 6″ piece of pipe to keep it centered. The bottom plate is a 3/4″ piece of scrap cabinet grade plywood on top of a 5/4 piece of oak and has some 1x stringers to prevent it from sliding around.
I’ll post some photos of it in action soon. I did a test with one of our existing slip molds for making a piece of tile trim. Worked well up until the point that it blew out the side of the mold.
Update photos of mold breakage.
That looks like a pretty cool tool. What do you mean it blew out the side of your mold? Did it crunch and distroy it?
I’m looking forward to seeing this thing in action
It works really well, maybe too well. It will take some time to get a feel for the amount of pressure a mold can withstand.
We have a series of open faced molds that we gang together so the bottom of one closes the face of the next one and then poured slip clay in to them to make solid moldings.
I used one of those molds and put a log of clay in it and started pumping . It broke the mold from the outward pressure of the clay being pushed into the mold. I’ll post some photos.
Before I put the wooden plates on I stuck a 2×4 in between the ram and the horizontal rail. It snapped it in half like a twig.
[...] 13, 2010 by scottinjupiter We made the first mold today for our new tile press. The original tile is 4″ x 10″ plus shrinkage allowance and the pressed tiles will be [...]
Hi, Thanks for the good info on the press. Do you happen to know how much it would move if we didn’t bolt to the floor. Doesn’t look like you did from the pic, but wasn’t sure.
Great work!
Ours is not bolted to the floor and probably never will be. We’ve needed to move it a few times. It doesn’t move at all during use. I’m sure it would in a mechanics shop as it is designed for but pressing clay is very light duty work for this. In fact I would recommend a lighter duty press, this is very powerful.
I am interested in building a tile press as well…did you buy this somewhere or build it yourself?
Harbor freight. It’s in the post.
I see you: bought the whole thing at harbor freight, i thought you meant just the hydraulic mechanism, thanks!
Yep I just built the wood press plates, some five year old Chinese kids did all the hard work.
Could it be used in lieu of a slab roller for 8″ x 14″ slabs 3/8″ thick ?
Sure could. I would make a 8×14 frame out of plywood to compress the slab within.