Monarch semi automatic printing woes

[slowbird]

Hi, I have been trying to get an old semi automatic press working.

The name of it is Monarch. It accepts 40 x 40" screens. It has a sort of pull stroke with an ink well on a hinge butted up against the squeegee. It inks the screen as it pulls. I don't know if that is unusual.

My question is: How do you refill the ink well on a semi automatic press?

With the Monarch press, in order for it to print tw ink with any kind of success, I have to water the ink down. After a few dozen pulls, that liter-sized ink well has dumped all over the screen. I use a dust pan and ink scraper on the screen and scoop it all up into the ink well. Trouble is, by the time I get that ink back in, even more has poured out! Another thing is, that watery ink really goes through my tripled up blue tape around the screen frame, making for some puddles.

Any thoughts on the matter?

[crosshair]

Pics would help, put a few up.

If it inks on the print stroke, what is it doing on the up stroke?
Do you have the floodbar on backwards so it sticks on the squeegee and doesnt drop on the up stroke to contain the ink and flood the stencil?

[squeegeethree]

Copy and pasted from here
http://www.sakurai-gs.co.jp/en/topics/sun/pdf/Vol5.pdf

Monarch 25 — the first fully-automatic screen press
Depending on the print size and materials used, semi- automatic screen presses were limited to 100 to 800 prints per hour, however, and increasing the number of colors used in multi-color printing resulted in visibly reduced printing accuracy. I had faith in the future of screen presses, however, and felt that we had the technology to manufacture fully-automatic screen presses offering high speed and accuracy. This was in the early 1960s.
After a great deal of trial and error, we completed the first Japanese automatic flat-bed press, the Monarch, in 1967, which incorporated our own technology based on what we had learned from foreign-made automatic presses. We produced two versions, the 636 mm x 469 mm Monarch 25 and the 900 mm x 600 mm Monarch 38, which sold both in Japan and overseas.
Links with General Research forged by the Monarch
The flat-bed system nevertheless failed to satisfy fully in terms of speed and accuracy, and I continued to play with ideas for high-speed, high-accuracy presses. At a meeting with Mr. Nagase, the managing director (later president) of Mino Shigyosyo, I took the opportunity to ask his opinion. Nagase told me that he had read an article in an American industry journal describing how such presses were already being made by General Research, but that collaboration would be difficult.
In 1968, we demonstrated the recently completed Monarch at the Chicago Print 68 exhibition in America. It received an enthusiastic response as the first Japanese fully-automatic screen press.

[slowbird]

Pics!

monarch semi auto press - Imgur

[slowbird]

Looks like what I have may be a semi-auto prototype of sorts made before those mentioned in the pdf.

[squeegeethree]

We really need some pics of this press. Are you sure it's not a cylinder printing style press?

[slowbird]

[slowbird]

[slowbird]

[squeegeethree]

Wow that is awesome. Really is a late 60s machine from the looks of it.
I say skip the ink well entirely and figure out how to rig it up to flood the screen without using the inkwell