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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
During a lull at the recent ATF conference, I took the opportunity to remove the matrix I had electroformed from its rubber mould and pass it around. The matrix copy appears to have excellent detail. Unfortunately, the matrix copy is…
One of the items I picked up at the swap meet of the recent ATF conference was a brand-new-old-stock Rule Guide Pin (c39F1) for the Monotype Composition Caster. This not only let me verify the dimensions I had from my…