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…
Category: Us
Acorn Squash Harvest
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…
Storage box for brasses and coppers
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…
Things from the parts heap at Firefly Press
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…
Tagged with: Firefly Press
More Spring-Making
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…
Electroformed Matrix: the Reveal
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…
Another composition caster rule repaired
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…
Back from the ATF conference
The American Typecasting Fellowship conference was held this year in and around Salem NH from August 13th to the 17th, and I think it would be safe to say that a good time was had by all attending. The conference…
Our New Baby!
Through a Kijiji ad, we found that the Goodwill store in London ON had a small press for sale. We finally had to chance to go have a look at it (it helped that the London Lee Valley store was…
Brake repairs on the car
When I was younger I did a lot of the service myself on my old Valiant. This car was made when the early rounds of pollution controls were added so the engine was still relatively simple to service. After that,…
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