One of the books I recently acquired from Don Black has the rather bland title Function and Operation of the 15-17 Casting Machine but after reading this book, I see how the subtitles reveal its true importance: Including Supplementary Equipment…
Month: September 2014
Papertrail at Heart and Hand Festival 2014
Next Saturday, September 27th from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Joseph Schneider Haus in Kitchener will be holding its annual Heart and Hand Festival as part of Culture Days. This event will be part indoors and part outdoors, and will…
Quick Roller Diameter Gauge
In letterpress printing it is often necessary to check the diameter of various rollers in the press. In general the rollers that transfer ink eventually to the forme have to be of a consistent diameter so that the ink is…
New (to me) Monotype documents
Late last week I picked up a pile of Monotype manuals and other publications from Don Black. These were generally duplicates to ones he already has. Many of these documents are ones I already have as well, although some are…
Tagged with: Don Black
A failed repair job
Many years ago I bought an auto-darkening welding helmet. This was back when they cost several hundred dollars and were only sold by serious welding shops. They hadn’t hit the hobby market yet. Nowadays similar helmets (but with much larger…
Acorn Squash Harvest
This weekend I harvested the acorn squash in my vegetable garden. The largest ones are about the size of a volleyball. I had planted 6 groups of three seeds each (which exhausted the entire seed packet) and kept the strongest…
Mulberry damage
This weekend while mowing the lawn I found that several branches of my mulberry bush had bent flat onto the ground. Some still appeared healthy but others were wilted. It would seem that some animal had eaten all the bark…
Storage box for brasses and coppers
In setting type for letterpress, very thin spaces are sometimes required to fill in a line to match the length of adjacent ones so that everything is held tight when locked into the chase. The spaces are known as brasses…
Things from the parts heap at Firefly Press
These are a few of the things I scrounged from the parts heap at Firefly Press in Boston on the departure day from the recent ATF conference. The first is a bit of an oddity. I’ve never seen it in…
Tagged with: Firefly Press
More Spring-Making
Over the past few months, Jason Dewinetz at Greenboathouse Press has been working on getting his Supercaster running, but he was having trouble casting 14 point type from American-style display matrices. He was finding that he had to run his…
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