On Tuesday I was driving along highway 401 where it crosses the Grand river in south Kitchener when I saw the silhouette of a very large bird flying south of the highway. I only saw it for a second or…
Category: Kevin
Glycerin Specific Gravity
Today I used my pycnometer and precision scale to measure the specific gravity of the glycerin which we sell and which I use when I’m trying out recipes for home-made composition rollers. I started taking a video of this procedure…
18 Point Frustration
I have some display casting to do in 18 point on my Monotype Composition Caster, but I’m having a tough time finding a set of accessories that will work together to accomplish this. My original intent was to use my…
Fixing up a laboratory scale
Several years ago I purchased at an auction a laboratory scale for doing precision weighing. Up until now it has sat in a corner collecting dust, covered with auction stickers and missing one cover. I recently undertook to clean and…
A pycnometer
That’s ‘pyc’ sounding like an ice ‘pick,’ ‘n’ as you would expect, and the rest rhymes with ‘barometer’ with the ‘nom’ being the stressed syllable. This is a fancy name for a container which can be filled to a very…
Preparing to cast some type
Someone has asked me to cast some type to fill out a font they already have. For reasons unknown, he has almost no capital S and is also short on capital C and T. He mailed me a sample type…
More home-made Monotype Caster parts
Someone had asked me for some parts for their Monotype Compositon Caster. Like me, he has the pump latch mechanism but he’s missing the modified pump spring rod and spacer sleeve, so he asked me to make a set for…
Some observations on home-made composition rollers
In a post about two years ago concerning our then-newly-acquired Kelsey press I mentioned that I had made my own composition rollers for it. Someone had inquired about how I made these, and it has taken me this long to…
Crazy Sharp!
This morning I was setting up some paper to cut on our guillotine. I was positioning the stack of paper under the clamp when I noticed that the edge of the clamp didn’t feel “right” against my knuckle. That’s when…
An interesting book about pulp & paper science
After a recommendation on the Papermaking Yahoo Group a few months ago, I purchased a copy of Pulp Technology and Treatment for Paper by James d’A. Clark, published in 1978 by Miller Freeman Publications, San Fransisco, California. I purchased my…
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