Rollers

Listen to any decent lino/woodcut artist and they will tell you to get a soft roller. Eric Gaskell also said to me, “You get what you pay for.”

When I started doing this, I hadn’t taken time to listen to anybody, so I just bought a couple of the cheapest rollers I could find. Ones like these. Hard rubber rollers. They were about £5 each.

Doing lino cuts with hard rubber rollers, price doesn’t really come into it. You just can’t get a decent even coat of ink no matter how hard you try. The results are always just disappointing.

Softness or hardness of rubber (or the like) is measured against a scale called “Shore”. It is a measure of the material’s resistance to being stabbed with a needle by a machine. 100 Shore would be pretty much invulnerable and 0 Shore might as well not be there. I don’t know what shore these rollers were. I’d guess something in the region of 60 or 70. You can feel some give if you squeeze it, but not much.

Well, it wasn’t too long before I’d listened to advice, so was seeking a softer roller. I got one of these.

It’s by Essdee and note that its the blue one, not red or black. I think these are around 40 Shore and I paid just under £20 for this one. It’s much, much better than the hard rubber ones. The get-what-you-pay-for scale would suggest almost 4 times better. I’d probably agree with that.

I’d not had the Essdee long when I stumbled across this one on ebay. Someone had bought it in a fit of enthusiasm and then never used it. Still in its cellophane wrapper. It’s one of Lawrence’s Artist quality rollers, made from a rather cool-looking material called Durathene. 25-30 Shore. This one was £100 as opposed to around £150 new. I pounced. 

It’s a god among rollers. Really. If something happened to it I’d have to get another one. And I’d pay full price, no question. Lawrence also supply replacement rollers to fit the handles, so in the case of damage or wear, I can be up and running again for about half the price.

Now this got me thinking. Lawrence also do a “student quality” version of this roller also with replacement rollers. The handle is a straight one and less bulky, but the roller is just a narrower diameter. It just happens to be the right diameter to fit the handles of my rather naff hard rubber rollers. Handles I quite like, really. The hard rollers were easy to remove with a pair of pliers, and I’d got some M6 threaded rod, nuts and washers in the shed, so I was good to go.

I had a bolt long enough for the small roller, and used one of those nuts with a plastic insert that don’t come off easily on the end of the threaded rod for the other. Then I’ve put wing nuts on the other end so I can get them off and on easily. 

So now I’ve got a little set of three Durathene rollers for around the price of one.