There's a stack of filament spools on my studio shelf right now, wedged in next to the collectibles and the old cameras, and every single one of them is earmarked for a printing press. Yes... A printing press. In 2026. And I'm not building it alone. The rabbit hole A while back I stumbled onto a project called the Brockway 250 by a designer and maker named Eric Paul Wittke. It's a 19-inch press for linocut and woodcut prints, and here's the part that grabbed me: you 3D print most of it. A pile of printed parts, some metal hardware, and roughly $300 later you've got a real working press. The traditional version costs a couple grand and weighs about as much as a Buick. Eric released the whole design free and open-source. Material lists, print settings, assembly instructions, all of it. And the guy himself has been super nice and responsive whenever I've hit him with questions, which, if you've ever tried to build somebody else's open-source project, you know is worth more than the files themselves. (Side note: his lab page is its own rabbit hole. The man built an AI tool that translates cuneiform. Cuneiform.) The real reason Here's the part that matters more than the specs. My grandson lives with Cynthia and me. He's almost 8. And this is our end-of-summer project together, the big one that carries us into the new school year. We're a project family. A while ago we did some linocut printmaking with him and his parent, carving blocks, rolling ink, pulling prints, the whole messy but fun thing. He loved it. So this press is the next evolution. First you learn to pull a print. Then you build the machine that pulls the print. And honestly, this loop started way before him. When I was a teenager I was elbow deep in silk screen work. In high school I did my co-op at a big web press company, standing next to machines the size of a house, watching paper fly through them. Ink has been sneaking into my life for about fifty years. Now I get to hand that down. Not as a lecture. As a build. Why my brain says yes Look, I know how this sounds. Guy with ADHD announces a big multi-month build project. You've heard this song. So have I. I've sung it. But this build is shaped differently than my usual pattern of buy it, hyperfocus for a weekend, shelf it forever. It's chunked. Every part is its own little print, its own little win. Neither of our brains has to hold "build a printing press" in its head. We just have to hold "print this one bracket tonight." And a build partner who asks "is it done yet?" every single morning is the best accountability system money can't buy. Where we're at We're not starting from zero, either. Past Mike actually did Future Mike a favor for once. The filament's already bought, and for the past couple months I've been sneaking in test prints here and there. Dialing in settings. Making sure my printer and Eric's files get along before we commit to the big structural pieces. So now it's go time. The real parts start coming off the printer this week. What happens next I'll post updates here as the build moves. Not on a schedule (let's be honest with each other), but at the real milestones: parts finished, assembly day, first ink on paper. You'll get the wins and the faceplants both. If a part warps at 2am or an almost-8-year-old loses a critical bolt, you'll hear about it. And when the whole thing is done and we've pulled our first prints off it, this rabbit hole gets the full Rabbit Hole review treatment. Resources The Brockway 250 project page Eric's lab, where the other rabbit holes live