So, naturally we screeched to a halt and ran back to see what it might be. It turned out to be this gorgeous open platen printing press, made by Chandler & Price of Cleveland, Ohio. Founded in 1881, Chandler & Price continued to make open platen presses until 1964, the "
last American company to produce a hand-fed, flywheel-driven platen press".
According to
one site which deals with Chandler & Price presses, they were ubiquitous, being found in almost every print shop on the continent at one time. This must mean that they worked pretty well and were built to last. There was a lot of steel and iron in these presses. Ones of this size weigh something over 2,000 pounds. Without having measured it we can't say which model this is as they made several different sizes.
This is a Chandler & Price "Oldstyle" press, but we can't say when it was built, only that it was superseded by the "Newstyle" press sometime in the early twentieth century. Though these were often manually operated, they were designed to be motorized through a flat belt pulley low on one side. This machine has been recently repainted and looks almost like new.