Mystery Matcase Solved!

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Composition Caster, Monotype Composition Caster, Mystery Parts — 1 Comment ↓

Thanks to Mark K. Digre on the Letterpress mailing list, I think the mystery of the strangely-sized cellular matrices has been solved!

The mechanism for using this matcase is described in US patent number 1079321. Essentially, the caster is fitted with longer locking racks which extend beyond the airpin blocks to the rear and to the left of the caster. The extensions on the racks have teeth and locking dogs which correspond to the 0.3″ spacing of the oddball matrices. Pneumatic cylinders are used to set these locking dogs, and also to suppress the standard mechanically-operated dogs, and the air for this is timed by a valve operated by a supplementary cam on the main camshaft.

A manual valve either leaves this system completely off, for normal casting, or allows air to the pneumatics for the front airpin block. The position of the front jaws then determines whether the rear airpin block uses the standard or modified locking dog, thus providing for the different spacing of the bottom three rows of matrices in the matcase.

Overall the system appears rather awkward, and the new racks and locking dogs would be subject to a lot of wear since each time they lock, they would have to move the rack up to 0.1″ from the standard position selected by the airpin to the 0.3″ grid location, against the force supplied by the Pin Jaw Tongs Spring (57E) and the Jaw Tongs Spring Box (26E).

At least this was an improvement over US patent number 1094678, which fitted the back of the matcase with extended cones to catch the centering pin even when grossly mispositioned and drag the matcase to the correct location. This system required the cone holes to not be on the 0.3″ grid because that would put the standard grid locations too far from the desired locations and the centering pin would not be able reach the cone hole, even these grossly enlarged ones. As a result, the cone holes were off center in the mats which meant in turn that the mats could not be so freely repositioned in the matcase. This system would cause a great deal of wear to the centering pin and the cone holes of the mats, because this final positioning would be pulling against the Jaw Tongs Spring Box (26E).

I also found the definitive description of this in my copy of The Monotype System (second edition, 1916, by Lanston Monotype Machine Co.), sections 526-535 (pages 227-231).

More Matcase Storage

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Monotype Composition Caster — No Comments ↓

Over the past year or so I’ve purchased more composition matrices and so far they’ve been sitting on the floor, in the way, in the boxes they were shipped in.

The top four are the new ones

Last week I made four more cases to hold them, to match the 7 cases I already had, for a total of 11 cases each capable of holding 24 matcases. For lack of a better location, I just placed them on top of some of the older cases, and promptly filled over half of them.

Yes, I got one of the partitions installed backwards. So sue me.

These matcases are still only identified by which case slot they are placed in. The actual markings on the cases are somewhat random based on where they came from. I think what I will be doing is placing my own serial number on each matcase, and recording on the computer what faces are in each case, along with the arrangement used.

Many of the new matcases have only a single font loaded into them. This is particular true for faces like the Gothic faces which do not include small caps or italics, so there are only two alphabets (uppercase and lowercase), one set of figures, and points, or around 72-80 matrices. The remainder of these matcases are filled with junk matrices: cellular mats for fonts that are too small or too worn out to be useful. You can leave an empty position in a matcase but if you accidentally try to cast that position in the matcase, you get a real mess of a squirt to clean up in the caster, so filling with mats—any mats—is well advised. As I was loading these matcases into the storage cases I was wondering if these junk mats actually held any treasures…

I have a few empty matcases around, and a few fonts of cellular mats that are just in boxes, so I may be loading a few more matcases later.

Updated Typeface List

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Font Casting, Kevin, Things we sell — No Comments ↓

Our list of faces that we can cast has been updated to include the composition matrices we have acquired over the past year or so. Unfortunately, I still don’t have the computer control for the caster running, so I still can’t cast composed type. However, all the typefaces are also available as fonts for handsetting. So if you want a font of 5-point Modern, you’re in luck (assuming I can get a disused 5-point mould to work).

Mystery Monotype Matcase

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Monotype Composition Caster, Mystery Parts — 5 Comments ↓

I have a matcase for Monotype composition casting that is a bit of a mystery to me.

Some of it is easy to figure out: This case contains 14-point 175A Bodoni and 14-point 79J Caslon Bold (with french accents). I found this by disassembling the case and inspecting the markings on the individual matrices. This is a Lanston-style case with the “combs” to separate the matrices rather than the English style case with the rods and perforated plates.The unusual feature is the size and spacing of the individual matrices: The mats are 0.2×0.3″ and 0.3×0.3″ and anyone at all familiar with Monotype composition casters will know that the matrices should be all positioned on a 0.2″ grid. The caster can only position the matcase at multiples of 0.2″ and so would not be able to position to every second row in this matcase, nor to any second column in the bottom three rows.

The benefit is the ability to have two full upper/lowercase alphabets, which is not possible using the standard Large Composition matcase layouts (used for sizes over 13 point). Large Comp uses mats that are double-width and/or double-height and so fitting even a single alphabet, figures, and points, is tight.

I had thought that one would need a caster fitted with custom airpin blocks, with the airpins spaced 0.3″ apart, and locking racks to match. You could kludge the Unit Shift mechanism (making it shift 0.1″ instead of the usual 0.2″ with customized matrix jaws) to avoid needing a custom front pin block. But then further thought reveals that the rear pin block needs not only the standard 0.2″-spaced positions (for the top 7 rows in the case) but also the 0.3″-spaced positions (for the bottom 3 rows). So the rear pin block would need 20 addressable positions with somewhat staccato spacing. Getting that many airpins in there may be possible, but then what ribbon punch combinations would address these (the normal punch combinations can address 17 positions)?

And of course, the easy bit, the normal wedge would need to be made with only ten positions corresponding to the ten rows in the matcase.

The wear on the rear cover of this case indicates that it has been used. So does anyone have any useful observations on this? Is this some experiment that escaped the development lab? Or was some Monotype client big enough to afford all the caster customizations required to make this work?

Some answers can be found in my follow-up post.

Walnut Ink Shrinkage

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Calligraphy, Us — No Comments ↓

Several years ago I made a batch of walnut ink. We’ve had a 500ml bottle of this sitting near our desk since then.

Over the years the bottle has collapsed from a vacuum forming inside, and I finally decided to vent this bottle. Once I opened it, and carefully squeezed the sides of the bottle to expand it back to its original round shape, I found that almost half the contents had vanished.

We had a few smaller bottles of this ink as well, and they also collapsed like this.

You might think that this is due to water somehow escaping from the bottle, but we use these bottles for several water-based products, and we have not seen this much shrinkage in those.

The only other conclusion is that the ink is undergoing some transformation which causes it to actually absorb the water chemically. This would probably be a hydrolysis reaction where a chemical bond breaks and a pair of hydrogen and hydroxyl ions attach themselves to the loose ends.

But then I weighed the bottle and it weighs about 320g, consistent with the weight of a 500ml bottle half-full of a mostly-water substance. So I suppose this is just water loss through the bottle and cap seal after all. If the water had been absorbed chemically, the weight should have been around 550g (500 g ink plus some allowance for the bottle).

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What was lost is now found!

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Kevin, Monotype Composition Caster — No Comments ↓

Ever since the ATF conference in Salem MA in August 2014, I’ve been looking for the 49A matrix holder which I had brought to the conference to show around. This is a holder for using Lanston display matrices with the English display moulds. This holder was interesting insofar as it had a failed attempt, from the factory, to repair a casting defect, leaving the tip of a tap broken off in the body of the holder.

Well, I’ve found it again:

Proof positive that this is the same holder, I removed the cover and verified that the broken tap was there:

The red arrow points to the broken tap. They were attempting to repair that hole in the casting visible just above the tap. It appears that they decided that the hole was not critical and gave up repairing it.

So where has it been for the past six years? It was in a crate of keyboard spare parts! I had brought this crate along with me to the conference for the swap meet, and it seems that after showing the mat holder around it ended up in this crate when I packed up.

It turned up this week when I was rummaging through all my spare parts looking for anything related to casting strip material on the composition caster.

So far, I can’t cast strip material because the strip casting moulds use a different pump (the nozzle has a different location). The strip-casting pump I have is a Lanston pump, and my caster is an English one so the pump will not fit. The Lanston pumps are wider where the levers that operate them run. In order to use this pump (and any other Lanston pumps, of which I have several), I need Lanston versions of the pump levers with part codes 18H and 24H.

I’m also missing several pieces of the linkage that operates the mould blade for the strip moulds, but I should be able to make my own parts for this. But the pump levers are castings that I can’t reproduce easily.

In the meantime I’d received another 49A holder from Rich Hopkins, but it is always nice to have a mystery solved!

A few price increases

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Things we sell — No Comments ↓

We’ve had to restock some of our additives recently, and as our costs go up, we have to raise our prices as well. Here is the updated pricing:

Titanium Dioxide

125g 250g 500g 1kg 2kg
$8.10 $13.20 $22.28 $36.00 discontinued

Calcium carbonate

125g 250g 500g 1kg
$1.95 $3.30 $5.45 $8.95

Kaolin

250g 500g 1kg 2kg
$1.45 $2.50 $4.05 $6.85

The titanium dioxide is around 3 times the old price, but then, we haven’t increased that price since 1997.

4WD repairs on my 2013 Dodge Ram 2500

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Kevin, Vehicles — No Comments ↓

Wiring harness damage

For a while now I’d been having trouble with the 4-wheel drive shifting on my Dodge Ram 2500 pickup truck. I would select to shift to 4-wheel drive, and the shift would start but never complete. At least once I found the truck in 4WD without asking for it, and often I would get a warning message about a malfunction.

Last winter I traced the problem to damage somewhere in the wiring harness so I ran a temporary wire to cure it.

Now that the weather is nicer I repaired the harness properly. I had to do this anyway because another wire had failed and the shifting again did not work.

I managed to expose the harness and repair the wires, which seemed to have been damaged just by chafing against another surface. I had suspected rodent damage but I saw no tooth marks in the damaged area of the harness. I repaired the broken wires, re-sheathed the harness, and got it all back in place and working, all detailed in this YouTube video.

I never did figure out how the harness was damaged in the first place.

Now I have a nearly-new shifter motor and Drive Train Control Module (DTCM) which I had tried installing during the winter to cure the problem, and no use for them. Maybe I’ll try selling them on eBay.

National Arts Drive postponed to June 20th

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Past Events — No Comments ↓

Due to recent circumstances the National Arts Drive has decided to postpone their event until Saturday, June 20th.

The National Arts Drive

Posted on by kpmartin Posted in Fairs and Shows, Hand Papermaking, Marbling, Other people, Past Events, Us — No Comments ↓

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/05d431_baf00304e32f4bd9bab4672aa6cdfbe9~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_632,h_627,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/Join-Square.webpIt is slightly late notice, but this Saturday, June 6th postponed to Saturday, June 20th 2020, something called the National Arts Drive, a sort of drive-by studio tour, will take place across North America. We will be participating in this, with some of handmade and marbled paper on display.

Artists’ studios will be set up to allow viewing from a safe distance.

If you plan on visiting some of the sites, you can register at https://www.nationalartsdrive.com/drive; registration is definitely not required, but it would be helpful to give the organizers some idea of how many people will be attending.

This is in support of the art community, which has been suffering financially due to the pandemic. For us, this has meant the cancellation of several craft fairs which would normally be our main sales venue for our paper and marbling products.

Because of the short notice we’re not sure what we’ll have on display, nor of how many other sites there will be nearby, but we hope some of you take the time to visit your own local studios for this event.

For more information, either as an exhibitor or a viewer (“driver” as they call it), you can visit their web site.

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