After the really bad casting day a few weeks ago, almost anything would be an improvement. I had taken steps to resolve some of the problems, and here is the result:
Category: Letterpress
A Bad Casting Day
Yesterday I made a try at casting a font of 12-point Caslon Old Style using composition mats and the computer interface for the caster.The results were less than stellar. A whole bunch of things went wrong:
Thoughts on Making Lanston Matrix Blanks
There are times where it would be nice to be able to make my own Lanston-style display matrices to use on my Monotype Composition caster. Often I find that matrices made by other casting aficionados were made by cannibalizing a…
Relabeling Those Pesky Caslon Matrices
I recently found a pair of mis-labeled matrices in my set of 18-point Caslon Old Style, and although I could just leave a note in the storage box, I thought it would be better to just correct the markings on…
More on that ‘st’ (de câlisse) matrix
My previous casting of 18-point Caslon Old Style had enough defects that I ended up re-casting it. A couple of the problems are described herein. After calculating all the adjustments to cast the ‘st’ ligature from the non-factory-made matrix, I…
Exploding Mould Blade Operating Rods!
During my recent casting run of 18-point Caslon Old Style I found that there were enough problems with the font that I decided to just recast it entirely. I had solved all my alignment, set-width, and substandard matrix problems, so…
Casting #337 Caslon Old Style 18pt
This is the first time I have cast this particular font, and although it mostly went well, I had one sort that miscast. The problem first showed up on a carbon-paper proof of the type:The ‘st’ ligature seemed to be…
Line Length Gauge Collection
I was cleaning up the workshop a bit last week and ran across a small project which had fallen by the wayside. As part of all the Monotype parts I had collected, there was a random assortment of line length…
Casting Twisted Type
I was recently casting some 14-point Caslon Old Style on my Monotype Composition Caster and I was finding that after casting a long run of some wider letters, the type was coming out with an interesting distortion:The top of the…
An interesting type duplicating mould
Yesterday I was at the Mackenzie Printery and Newspaper Museum in Queenston Ontario. The museum is not open to the public right now, but members still meet there to work on organizing and cataloguing the collection, and I was in…
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