A few years ago I installed improved lighting in my basement workshop. Recently I’d been noticing that the light switch sometimes made a “pop” or slight sparking noises when I switched it on or off. This seemed to be getting…
Category: Kevin
Giving up on Strip Casting (for now)
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…
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…
A Home-made Monotype Display Mould Coupling Hook
The Monotype caster type carrier not only catches the type as it ejects from the mould and carries it to the type channel for final delivery, but it also moves the mould crossblock between its casting position and its jet-eject…
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