Category: Equipment Acquisition, Repair, and Maintenance

Estimating Dry Weight of Composition Material

While trying to remelt some old composition rollers recently, I found that some of the material wouldn’t melt. Neither higher temperatures nor additional water helped. All I ended up with was a lumpy soup, from which I strained the lumps

Now I know…

…why the Monotype manuals say not to raise or lower the pot unless it is molten. They never explained why this could cause any problems, and the pump piston linkage is jointed enough to follow the pot up and down

An Unusual Monotype Mould

I found an unusual Lanston Monotype 30pt display mould (for the Composition caster and Type and Rule caster) at my last visit to Don Black’s. What intrigued me was that the top of the blade appeared to be split into

It’s Getting Real

I actually went out and purchased some aluminum stock for making the computer control valve for my Monotype. That’s a piece of 1″ aluminum square bar which will make the mouthpiece that fits against the air holes in the caster’s

Sorting the Sorts

Now that I have the font display matrices in boxes, I have an assortment of sorts matrices to sort out and store. In addition to the sorts I also had a few cardboard boxes of unfiled small caps, odd sizes,

But then there’s the sorts matrices…

I have my display font matrices in proper boxes now, but I still have mats for symbols, arrows, braces and brackets, ornaments, borders, etc. to sort out and inventory. Most of these were in the loose tray at top left.

Display matrices all in boxes (finally)

I finally have all my Monotype display matrices, at least the ones I plan on keeping in the long run, in uniform storage boxes. Altogether I have 82 faces in 82 boxes, each box containing between 1 and 5 sizes.

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Tramming the Mill

In order to get a good finish when milling the top surface of a part, as I will be doing to prepare matrix blanks, it is necessary that the axis of the mill spindle be perpendicular to the surface of

An Interem Solution to the Pneumatic Valves Problems

This week I’ve been occupied with (finally) putting away all the display mats I bought last year at the Anderson and Skyline matrix auctions. They have been cluttering up the shop since last summer with their variety of packaging. I

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More information on Matrix pneumatic valves

This week I was having another look at the pneumatic solenoid valves I want to use to run my Monotype from a computer. I was somewhat disappointed that the valves I had were the Normally Open (N/O) type and designed

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