Author: kpmartin

Monotype piston rod—Mounted on mill, ready for cutting

After finishing one side of the extended-stroke piston rod for my Monotype, I took apart all the work holders and gave the mill a bit of a cleaning. The rod has now been clamped down to the milling table with

Monotype piston rod milling half-completed

With the flats completed on the piston rod, it was time to mill the groove by which the piston is raised and lowered. This took quite a bit of time as I had the mill running at very conservative feed

A new needle size

We noticed that we had a gap in our needle sizes: There was a big jump in diameter between the #17 needle (1.4mm) and the huge #15 needle (1.8mm). It may not seem like 0.4mm sounds like much but when

Our “new” guillotine

New to us, anyway, as it is older that the one it is replacing. This one is a Challenge Diamond 32″ guillotine with mechanical cut and manual clamp. This machine has an after-market dual-hand control added so you have to

Finally working on the Monotype piston rod again

It has been a while but I finally got around to working on the extended-stroke piston rod for my Monotype caster’s pump tonight. A while ago I had drilled and tapped the end hole for the handle. I was fortunate

Our second papermaking press

From some of the lessons I learned from our first press, I made a new one out of aluminum. I had the chance to practice my (horrible) skills at welding this metal, but ended up with a press that was

Our first papermaking press

This is a press which I made for Audrey even before we bought the Papertrail; we have since stopped using it and sold it. The following details are drawn  from memory so dimensions might not be exact. The cross-beams were

A little more cleaning on the Monotype Pump

Finishing the new extended-stroke piston rod is taking a little longer than planned, so in the meantime I decided to clean the piston and pump body lever mechanism. This is what transmits the pump spring pressure to the pump proper.

Mulberry maintenance

As part of trying to get better fibre from my mulberry plant, this year I am trying to prevent the original shoots from getting any side branches. This turns out to require some persistence at pulling off the suckers—the new

Eucalyptus pulp for sale

As part of a lot of papermaking equipment we obtained a while ago we got a stack of eucalyptus pulp (half-stuff) in sheet form. It had been used as blotters in a drying system. Although we don’t normally carry wood-based

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