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Recently I received a phone call from a Guild member who
had borrowed a pasting machine and was trying to figure
out how to use it for the first time. Perhaps many of
you also have never seen one being used before, so I put
together this series of pictures of our Tapofix 29 in
use.
This is our basic setup: a three-trestle, three-board
table, and the Tapo at the head of the table resting on
its own stand, which I made by building a pine box and
attaching a set of folding table legs.
I almost always pre-cut the room and pull the sheets one
at a time with pattern goods. It allows me to control
the pace of the installation, and it eliminates a lot
of planning time at the front end of the job. Here are
my sheets, face up, on the table. One of the bonuses of
using a machine is that the paper is fed face up, so there's
no battling the annoying curl on the table. The curl is
down, not up. No problem!
Lift up the lid of the machine and place the top edge
of the sheet on the paste wheel.
Next, pick up the sheet and move it a little further along,
sliding it over the scraper bar until the top edge is
sitting on the catch bar. On the Ramco machine, the top
edge, I believe, would be sitting on the back edge of
the machine. The Advance machines don't use a scraper
bar, but the feed method is the same.
Close the lid of the machine. Then, grab the top of the sheet and pull it back over the front of the machine, now with the paste side facing up, and onto the table.
Here you can see that the top of the sheet doesn't get
100% pasted in the feeding process, but that's OK, because
when the sheet gets booked, the paste-to-paste contact
more or less evens out the paste saturation. Sometimes
I'll feed the sheets bottom first. Since there's usually
some extra length on the bottoms of sheets, it doesn't
matter if the paste is light down there, so I'll skip
the part about laying the leading edge on the paste wheel.
Instead, I'll just lay the sheet right down with the edge
on the catch bar, close the lid, and pull.
This sheet is, in fact, being pulled "bottom first." You
can see by the puckering at the booked edge that the paste
application wasn't thorough. It doesn't matter. The sheets
were 10'4, and the wall was 9'6. That puckered part will
get trimmed at the baseboard. But, honestly, after booking
and sitting for ten minutes, the moisture spreads out,
and it all ends up sufficiently pasted anyway.
A pulled and booked sheet. "Zip, zip -- it is done!" No
paste on the table, no paste on the face of the sheet,
no sheets curling in on me, no "roller elbow."
This is a handy item: it's a Rubbermaid container that
serves as both a carrying case for the machine, and as
a booking container to keep the sheets from drying out.
It's a hard-to-find size, but Walmart usually stocks them.
Notice the "X" and "O" in blue tape. When we're pulling
drop matches, we'll stagger the stacks of X's and O's
side-to-side so we know which stack to pick from.
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