Monotype Repairs: An Enclosure for a New Pot Temperature Controller

The finished box. Dimensions are 5×7×5 inches.

While using my Monotype Composition Caster recently, I’ve noticed that the pot temperature has been drifting. On several occasions I’ve found it to be quite a bit hotter than the setpoint, to the point where I had to select a temperature a couple hundred degrees (F) cooler than what I wanted. This was after recalibrating the controller once.

I couldn’t trust that the caster would hold a stable temperature so I’ve been working on replacing the pot controller system with a modern electronic temperature controller which uses a thermocouple to measure the temperature of the molten type metal.

One thing I needed that I neither already had nor could find anywhere was a metal enclosure that was big enough to hold the new control electronics but small enough to perch comfortably in place of the old Partlow controller. I ended up making an enclosure myself, and documented my trials doing this in a new YouTube video.

As is often the case, projects like these move at a glacial pace, so my caster has been down for about three months waiting for me to finish this new controller. I hope that now that the case is complete the rest of the work will go faster.