The Wurdsand, Inc. Gets Their Own Press #

There were no hard feelings between Al and I when we went our separate ways. We both realized that we both needed different partners as we were just too much the same. Needed someone who could bring in printing jobs, and for me that was David Barns. We worked well together and David was always ready to help and get his hands a little dirty taking direction from me on what to do. However always going over to Nick’s for every little printing job was just not worth the trouble, we needed our own equipment. I called up Al and he was able to put together a set of Equipment for us which included an Offset press, Plate Burner, Light Table, Graphic Camera. I can’t remember what the total cost was, maybe $10,000.00 so I went back to my Mom and Dad not sure what to expect and I was almost floored when they said they would do it. I thought this would be a loan like the last time and it just occurred to me that this was probably how I bank rolled the Management of Rulen Records Studio with Katherine which I paid back when I moved home and my Dad was building his multi-level house and needed some cash, so I took out a loan and completed that cycle.

Turns out my Dad was wondering how he was going to make a fair deal with me, as I don’t think he ever really expected me to pay him back as he had given Rodney about $10,000.00 to help him get the piece of property that he was buying right beside Mom and Dad’s house. However, it was years later before he actually revealed that this was a gift not a loan.

David and I had use of big space in what was once some sort of old Union Hall. We must have paid some sort of rent and we got this space because we were friends with the guy who held the lease and I think he even got it for next to nothing. He made Id cards and parking lot access keys mainly. We setup our shop in the back of the building and our entrance was on the side of the building. It was an old building and I think there were plans to demolish it sometime in the future. Now we could print our own jobs right from our shop and no need to go over to Nick’s to run these jobs. We may have gone over there to do things like cut business cards as we did not have a paper cutter but that was pretty cheap.

I also found that for a lot of our work, I did not need a typesetter as the laser output from an Apple MacIntosh was really good. I would go a rent a Mac by the hour or the minute got what I needed for the job, laid it out made my negs and plates and printed it. We weren’t making a lot of money but it was coming in and we got paid as we delivered. One pretty steady gig that we had was making the Goose Looney Monthly Event Calendar. We printed this in color but we made our own separations by opening certain flaps of the negative while closing others for the different colors and used some screens of different densities for additional contrast. Actually now that I think about this more, we got this gig because Jim Beverage, the airbrush artist that did the Kim Kastle poster was commissioned to draw up this calendar every month. It was a lot of fun and challenging and Goose Looney (this was a night club in the South end of Edmonton) seemed very impressed every time that David delivered the final product.