the Papertrail

Mackenzie Printery’s Albion Press

Posted on 2026/08/09 by kpmartin Posted in Equipment Acquisition, Repair, and Maintenance, Kevin — No Comments ↓

The Mackenzie Printery and Newspaper Museum in Queenston, Ontario has a small Albion press which needs a bit of work to get it into top form. The pull handle does not retract all the way when released, so it interferes with opening the frisket frame. Over the years this has chewed up the pull handle a bit.

Pull handle damage from frisket frame. Bare wood is modern damage, but you can see older damage a bit to the left, though the latter might be due to not cranking the bed all the way out before opening the frisket

The handle is not retracting all the way because the pivot end is striking one of the bolts that hold the platen to the column. The bottom of the column actually has a land cut into it to place the nut a bit lower so the handle clears it, but the pull handle is hitting the bolt that extends above the nut. I think that ultimately this bolt will have to be shortened so it is flush with the top of the nut.

In the process of working on this problem I found that the spring mechanism that is supposed to hold the column and platen up (when the handle is released) was not up to the task.

A spring and eye bolt in this brass tube pull up on the column

At the top of the press there is a long eye bolt with a heavy spring and adjusting nut, all enclosed in a decorative brass tube, which pulls up on the column via the large pin seen in the lower part of the above photo. For reasons unknown (wear, lax original manufacturing tolerances?) the adjusting nut was no longer able to hold against the eye bolt. Disassembling things, I found that I could pretty much just slide the nut along the threaded shaft of the eye bolt.

The eye bolt and (L-R) the original nut, a test nut cut in HDPE, and a steel blank for the replacement nut

The eye bolt is clearly forged. You can see how a bar was wrapped around a mandrel and forge-welded to itself to form the shank of the bolt. The forge-weld seam is visible extending partway down the shank from the eye. About half the length of the shank was then forged round, and a thread cut into it, probably using a threading die. Because of wear, and this predating modern standardized thread sizes, determining the actual thread size, especially its nominal diameter, was difficult. It has 11½ threads per inch, so the closest designation I could guess was 9/16-11½.

Taps for this size just don’t exist. I considered making a new eye bolt to a modern size, but this is a historic artifact in a museum, so I wanted to use as many original parts as possible, which meant making a new nut to match this oddball thread.

I had to cut the internal thread on the replacement nut using single-point threading on my lathe. At some point I mistakenly thought this was 12½ threads per inch, so I was working out how to set up special change gears on my lathe to get this, when a test measurement on the lathe revealed my confusion and that, amazingly, the lathe could actually do 11½TPI with the standard change gears!For the lathe cutting tool, I started with a tap for ½NC13 (a modern standard thread) and ground off all but one tooth. I also ground down on either side of the remaining tooth because the thread I was cutting was a bit coarser than 13TPI so the tooth needed to be wider and cut deeper.

The modified tap mounted as an internal threading tool on my lathe

I did two test nuts, the first in HDPE, which is butter soft and easy to cut, and the second in aluminum, before tackling the final steel nut. I had already made the blank on the lathe, and used a rotary table on my mill to cut the hexagonal shape on the outside.

The final cutting process involved successive passes, cutting a couple of thousandths of an inch deeper each time, until the eye bolt would thread into the nut. Normally when threading on the lathe one uses an angled compound feed so only one side of the V groove is being cut, but on my lathe this introduces more play and more opportunities for mistakes so I opted for straight feed. After each pass, I had to retract the carriage two inches (the least common multiple of the 11½ thread pitch and the 8TPI pitch of the lathe feed screw), so I spent a lot of time “cutting air”. I also took light cuts because I did not want to risk breaking my cutting tool, so overall the process was quite time-consuming.

The new nut threaded onto the eye bolt

The finished nut still had tight spots on the eye bolt (though not so tight as to need a wrench), and was probably a really sloppy fit in terms of normal machining tolerances, but it fit well enough to do the job.

I also made a replacement for the plain washer that was between the nut and spring. The replacement has a shoulder to hold the spring centered, and a slight boss so the nut can be adjusted without scraping the top of the washer.

Combined washer/spring seat (top and bottom views)

I now have the column, pull handle, toggle mechanism, and platen all assembled on the press again. The original nut and washer have just been placed loosely on the top of the eye bolt to preserve them

The pull handle now retracts properly again, though it still strikes the platen bolt. There is still something uneven between the platen, bed, and frisket frame, and I want to take some careful measurement here before I actually shorten the one platen bolt to its final length.

Tororo-aoi in full bloom

Posted on 2026/08/09 by kpmartin Posted in Home-grown supplies — No Comments ↓

The tororo-aoi plants I’m growing come from several seed sources, with one producing plants much obviously larger than the others. Up until now only the larger plants had bloomed, and they now have several very large seed pods on them.

But finally, the smaller plants have started blooming, at least the ones seeded indoors, though the direct-seeded plants are still behind in development.

This variety seems to produce numerous flower buds from a single spot at the growing tip of the plant, and the flowers are noticeably larger than the ones on the larger plant.

Buds on one of the smaller plants on July 23^rd. I count at least ten buds here.

Large flower on small plant, August 1^st.

Most of the indoor-seeded small plants are now in bloom, August 6^th.

In order to avoid cross-pollination, I’m now removing any flower buds from the larger plants. These plants already have plenty of seed pods for me to collect when they ripen.

Tororo-aoi Fast Growth (in the smoke)

Posted on 2026/07/16 by kpmartin Posted in Home-grown supplies, Kevin — No Comments ↓

My last post, from four days ago, only showed details of some of the plants. Here is what the tororo-aoi patch looks like overall:

The difference between the four larger plants, the smaller indoor-sprouted medium plants, and the smallest direct-seeded plants is evident. I’m also managing an uncharacteristically (for me) good job of controlling the weeds.

The largest plant in the centre has a pod about 15cm long:

This is the same plant that was in the third photo in the previous post.

The smaller plants are just developing flower buds, and it looks like the flowers will be smaller, but more numerous, occurring in clusters of about three.

Both these photos, especially the second one, show a strange yellow colour cast. This is due to smoke from wildfires (I don’t know why they stopped calling them “forest fires”) in northern Ontario, beyond Thunder Bay. This made for other strange visual effects because the colour is often what the sky looks like when it is about to start raining. It also made the (normally white) instruments on the car’s instrument panel look very purple.

Tororo-aoi in Bloom Already

Posted on 2026/07/11 by kpmartin Posted in Home-grown supplies, Kevin — No Comments ↓

Some of my tororo-aoi plants are already producing flowers, about 3 weeks after transplanting into the garden. The flowers don’t last long so I don’t have a photo of one in full bloom yet, but in one of the photos you can see the dropped blossom with the young seed pod on the plant.These flowers are all on the four of the plants that are by far outgrowing the others, and I believe these are the ones sprouted from the old seeds I had purchased from Richter’s. All the plants are the same species, but I expect it comes in different varietals (just as tomato plants come in different varietals to produce different tomatoes), and this particular one is bred for big plants with showy flowers. The other seeds would be bred to produce larger roots, since that is the part used for making neri.

Once the smaller plants start to produce flowers and pods, I’ll leave all the flowers to coexist for a while, then I’ll start removing the flower buds from these larger plants. As a result I should get large-plant seeds from the early pods on the large plants, small-plant seeds from the later pods on the small plants, and various hybrids from the pods produced when all plants were in bloom.

I may also start trimming back some of the large plants so I can see in the fall if this makes them produce larger roots.

Growing Tororo-aoi Again

Posted on 2026/07/06 by kpmartin Posted in Home-grown supplies, Kevin — No Comments ↓

This year, after my encouraging results in workshops both at Bishop’s University last August and in Japan this March, I wanted to try growing my own tororo-aoi plants again. The roots of this plant are used to produce neri, a slimy formation aid used in Japanese-style papermaking.

I had previously grown some in 2007 in my vegetable garden with moderate success, using seeds I obtained from Tim Barrett at the IAPMA conference in Banff, and also in 2017 in my front garden using seeds from various sources. The 2007 effort gave me several good roots, some of which I’ve used and some of which are still in the freezer. I have yet to thaw them to see if they still produce good neri after 19 years frozen. The more recent crop yielded almost no useful roots, but I don’t know if the problem was growing conditions, soil quality, or plant variety.

Papermaking Workshop, August 15^th, 2026

Posted on 2026/07/06 by kpmartin Posted in Our own courses and workshops, Upcoming Events — No Comments ↓

We will be holding our Introductory Papermaking workshop on Saturday, August 15^th, 2026.
The workshop runs from 9am to 4pm with a 1-hour lunch break, at our shop in New Dundee, Ontario. The cost for the workshop is $80 plus HST, for a total of $90.40, including materials.

Monotype Computer Interface—Complete at last!

Posted on 2026/05/28 by kpmartin Posted in Caster Computer Control, Equipment Acquisition, Repair, and Maintenance, Kevin — No Comments ↓

After far too long the computer interface for my Monotype Composition Caster is complete. In this case, “complete” means that it is a single self-contained unit with no straggling wires.

My last step was to add a housing/support bracket for the power plug connector and 24 volt power supply. The design for this had to be adjusted so the entire unit would still fit on the caster.

Click on any photo for a larger version.

Here’s how it looks on the caster with the air regulator, filter, and pressure gauge installed:

I guess this now qualifies as a finished prototype. I will be updating my drawing files to match how this was made, since as the work progressed I deviated from the original design where the changes seemed like an improvement. The updated design will have some other changes on the internal parts to accommodate a proper case, to replace some of the obsolete components on the PCB, and to relocate the internal cycle sensor.

I should also change the pneumatics on my caster so this filter/regulator unit feeds the entire caster, and a flexible hose tapping off this would connect to the computer interface. This would mean that features like Unit Shift would work, and also that there would be less weight hanging off the front of the interface.

Papermaking in Japan—Part 5

Posted on 2026/05/20 by kpmartin Posted in Hand Papermaking, Kevin, Oguni Washi intensive workshop — 1 Comment ↓

Other notes

This is a bit of a wrap-up along with some reference links shared during the workshop

Papermaking in Japan—Part 4

Posted on 2026/05/16 by kpmartin Posted in Hand Papermaking, Kevin, Oguni Washi intensive workshop — No Comments ↓

The actual papermaking workshop

At last, on to the actual workshop!

Please also see the other parts of this series:

Monotype Fo(u)nt Scheme Oddity

Posted on 2026/04/21 by kpmartin Posted in Font Casting — No Comments ↓

I was casting some type this week when I noticed an oddity on the font schemes listed in the back of the The Monotype Casting Machine Manual, which is the basis for my usual casting font schemes. The font scheme gives the count of how many of each sort are cast to make up a font, and these were based on English text from around the early twentieth century.

Although some foundries would sell type with uppercase, lowercase, points (punctuation), and figures each being packaged separately, allowing the customer to make their own upper-/lowercase balance, the Monotype schemes are for a complete set including both upper- and lowercase as well as figures and points. There are two basic schemes: The ‘body’ scheme represents the letter frequencies encountered when composing running text in full sentences and paragraphs. The ‘jobber’ scheme represents the frequencies encountered when composing titles, headings, point-form lists, and other such items which generally require many more uppercase letters.

If you compare the two classes of schemes, it is generally the case that the counts of lowercase are the same, but in the Jobber schemes, the uppercase count if increased by about 2 less than 0.28 times the count of the corresponding lowercase. So, for instance with the letter ‘e’, either scheme has 118 lowercase, the body scheme has 12 uppercase, and the jobber scheme has 44 uppercase, which is close to 12+0.28×118-2 (equaling about 43).

That 0.28 figure is very vaguely in the ballpark of the reciprocal of the average word length (5 letters), and so what you would expect for titles, where pretty much every word is capitalized.

For the rarer letters, this formula gets fudged a bit, with uppercase ‘Z’ having 4 sorts in either case, and ‘F’ having 6 in body and 10 in jobber, but with 24 lowercase, the formula yields 13.

Some other letters are one or two extra uppercase away from the formula as well.

The real outlier, though, is M, where the jobber scheme actually has 4 fewer than the body scheme, 14 in jobber, 18 in body. It seems that the inconsistency is in the count in the body scheme, where, for instance M far outnumbers L, C, or U (6, 8, and 6 respectively) which have similar lowercase counts (14 or 16).

It is not clear if this is a typo in the table itself, showing 18 instead of 8, or whether they did not, in fact use general English text as their sample, but instead their own books and literature, which would be peppered with the capitalized “Monotype” trademark throughout!

As an aside, my earlier remark about using “early twentieth century” text as a sample is reflected in the figure frequencies, where 1 and 9 are heavily represented, as one would expect when usually referring to years in the 20th century. I should probably modify the schemes I use to add more 2’s and 0’s to better reflect the years one might now be mentioning.