After several unsuccessful attempts at casting strip material on my Monotype Composition Caster, I’m giving up for a while. The problems I’ve been fighting with include: Unfused strip material, which easily breaks up into pieces Blowback through the nozzle seat…
Category: Us
Lanston Monotype Pump Cleaning
I recently tried to get strip casting working on my Monotype Composition Caster but gave up after several failures. One suspect was the pump; the strip-casting moulds use a different pump than composition and display casting, and I had never…
Are ‘sign’ and ‘sine’ homophones?
At the dinner table last night the conversation wandered into homophones, and at one point ‘sine’ and ‘sign’ were offered as an example, to which I objected. I felt that they are (very subtly) different, but my family and, as…
Making a phone adapter for a tripod
There are a couple of videos I’d like to record. My current camera is 14 years old; it still works fine, but its video quality is poor by modern standards, so until I decide to buy a new camera I…
An Extended Drill Press Table
The table on my drill press is more or less a 12″/30cm square which is fine for drilling smaller objects but once the workpiece is large enough that its center of gravity is more than 6″/15cm from the hole you…
First try at strip casting
I have my Monotype composition caster converted to produce strip material—leading and rule—and this is my first try at running this setup. You can see the inauspicious results in my accompanying YouTube video. I am using a pump body which…
A novel motorcycle air filter (not!)
We’ve had a week of beautiful warm (for November) weather here and I took advantage of this to take my motorcycle (a 1987 Kawasaki EX500) out on several rides. Unfortunately on the last ride the bike decided that it wouldn’t…
Trying out the New Nozzle and Strip Mould
I installed the nozzle I just made into the special strip-casting pump. This pump is a Lanston (American Monotype) pump and my caster is an English-made one, and one of the incompatibilities between these is the pump body size. Although…
Home-made Monotype Nozzle
I’ve been working to get my Monotype composition caster converted to casting strip material. I have a few moulds for this, the special pump required (with a different nozzle location), the pump linkage required to run this Lanston (American) pump…
Wither Workshops?
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve had to suspend all of our workshops since early this spring. This was particularly disappointing because we had one planned for just then with plenty of participants. You may be wondering when we will…
Top