the Papertrail – Page 26

The K-W Maker Expo, Saturday September 19th

Posted on 2015/09/27 by kpmartin Posted in K-W Maker Expo, Moulds and Deckles, Past Events, Presses, Sheet forming, Us, Vats — No Comments ↓

The local maker club, Kwartzlab, is spearheading a big event coming up on Saturday, September 19th, 2015 called Maker Expo. This free event centered around Kitchener City Hall will feature all kinds of people and organizations who make things, about 80 exhibitors in all. Show hours are 10am-6pm.

We will be there demonstrating hand papermaking, about the only activity we can fit in the booth space available. You will be able to make your own sheet of paper, and take with you a sheet made by a previous visitor to our booth. The freshly-made sheets are too wet and fragile for you to take the sheet you made.

For more information you can use the Twitter hashtags #MakerExpo and #IAmAMaker, twitter/vine/instagram account @makerexpo, and their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/makerexpowr.

P.S. Duh! A week after Maker Expo I find this post still in Draft. Not exactly timely publishing!

Sunflowers!

Posted on 2015/09/27 by kpmartin Posted in Gardening, Us — No Comments ↓

This year we planted sunflowers in one of the flower beds in front of our house. Rather than the usual huge yellow variety, we selected some that would have a bit of a colour mix in them.

Because of their height, it is good that we didn’t plant any directly in front of the window. The flowers are about 10cm in diameter and the outer petals range from an orange-yellow to a sort of purple-red.

One plant clearly came from a rogue in the seed mix, because its flowers are closer to those of a standard yellow sunflower, and it has grown almost twice as tall, about 3m in total height!

We’re considering planting something similar next year, and maybe milkweed to fill the front gap with some vegetation.

Hollander Beater and Large Press Available in Toronto

Posted on 2015/08/18 by kpmartin Posted in Other people, Sold — 2 Comments ↓

We’re passing this on for someone:

Paper Making Equipment For Sale:

Paper making equipment designed by David Reina.

2lb dry weight pulp (Hollander) beater, stainless steel on stand with castors and technical manual

Couching tray on rollers

40 ton hydraulic press with drainage tray and laminated wood platens, on heavy duty castors with oil tank.

Set price for all 3 items: $5000

Contact Douglas 416-538-9445 or drobinson478@yahoo.ca

I should point out that these items are still available new from Carriage House Paper: The beater costs $9300 (with castors), the couching tray about $2100 (depending on size) and the press (50 ton, rather than 40 ton) about $13000, all in US dollars, not including crating and shipping costs. So if you’re pretty much anywhere in southern Ontario, this is a great price for this equipment!

~~Update: These items have been sold~~

Another Update: Apparently I was wrong, they have not sold. As of February 2017, the price for all these items has been reduced to $5000.

Final (I hope!) update: These items have been sold.

My tomato plants are dying (again)

Posted on 2015/07/12 by kpmartin Posted in Gardening, Kevin — No Comments ↓

I’m finding that the tomato plants in my vegetable garden, which have been growing so well up until now, are doing the same thing they’ve done for the past three or four years: They suddenly wilt, sicken, and die. What few tomatoes are on them right now may grow a bit and eventually ripen but I don’t get the great crop that early season growth had promised.

The wilt hits the plants one at a time, somewhat randomly through the patch, and generally starts at the top of the plant. The plant will be fine one day, then start showing droopiness the next day. The wilt gradually works down the stem and eventually up the other branches.

There is plenty of moisture in the soil so I’m at a loss as to what to do about this. This year I moved the tomatoes to a completely different part of the garden so it is not a soil-borne disease being carried from year to year, nor is it some effect from the (now distant) black walnut tree in the schoolyard.

One plant showing the wilted top leaves.

A row of plants, most healthy, but third from the rear is showing a lot of wilt.

It’s Getting Real

Posted on 2015/07/12 by kpmartin Posted in Caster Computer Control, Equipment Acquisition, Repair, and Maintenance, Kevin — No Comments ↓

I actually went out and purchased some aluminum stock for making the computer control valve for my Monotype.

That’s a piece of 1″ aluminum square bar which will make the mouthpiece that fits against the air holes in the caster’s paper tower, and some ¼″ thick aluminum plate which the valves will mount on and which will have a labyrinth of grooves to direct the compressed air from the correct valve port to the correct port on the caster.

Price Increases on Some Products

Posted on 2015/07/12 by kpmartin Posted in Things we sell, Us — No Comments ↓

Inflation once again rears its ugly head, forcing us to increase some of our product prices. I think many of our suppliers’ prices were set by the supply chain before the price of oil fell through the floor, so the price increases represent shipping costs and the fact that many of the affected products are derived from petroleum as a primary ingredient. There also seems to be a continuing trend of corporate consolidation and increased costs for processing small orders like ours.

The new prices are effective immediately, and are in our recently updated catalogue and New Products List (and their French counterparts).

The products affected are: Unbleached Abaca Pulp, Formation Aid, Coagulant (see below), Sizing, and Bone Folders.

We are also phasing out our liquid Coagulant, replacing it with a granular product that has similar properties. The new product is easier to store, has a longer storage life, and is cleaner to handle. We will continue to sell our remaining liquid Coagulant until we run out, and it will remain priced based on what it cost us, so it looks like a real bargain compared to its replacement, but we can assure you that if we continued to sell the liquid Coagulant, its new price would be comparable to that of the new powder product.

We are also planning on selling a granular retention agent to replace the Retention Agent and Scavenger products that we’ve been out of stock on for so long, but we expect that once we get these they will have substantially increased prices similar to those for the products mentioned above.

Blackberries!

Posted on 2015/07/10 by kpmartin Posted in Flora, Gardening, Us — No Comments ↓

…and not the ones RIM makes, either!

This year, the blackberry plants growing wild in our yard along the fences and stream valley seem to have a bumper crop of berries on them. I suspect the plentiful June precipitation had something to do with it.

So far I had just been nibbling on the occasional berry, but we decided to actually go out and pick them properly today.

We came back with about 5 cups of berries (not counting the ones eaten by the pickers), which really surprised me. One particular section between a fence and a building itself produced almost two cups of berries. I think the fence and building together provided shelter from the wind so ripe berries were not knocked off the plant, and also provided some protection from birds and animals.

Many of the plants still have lots of immature berries as well, so this good crop should continue for a while.

A Calligraphy Set We’ve Always had Trouble With

Posted on 2015/07/09 by kpmartin Posted in Calligraphy, Kevin — 2 Comments ↓

We’ve had this calligraphy set in our store for years, but we’ve never had any success using it. The problem we run into is that the ink does not wet the nibs and flow out properly; instead whatever ink gets on the nib just beads up in drops. This seems to happen no matter what ink we’ve tried (although I must admit this is definitely not a wide range, and in particular does not include oil-based inks).

The set includes several pen nibs, a handle, brush, pencil, black ink, and three colours of watercolour paint. Along with these tools and materials, there is a book of projects and a separate book on technique. The latter mentions the problem of the ink not wetting the nibs and suggests that new nibs must be thoroughly cleaned with soap. We’ve tried this to no avail as well. I have to wonder if these particular nibs are coated with some sort of silicone, which would be resistant to soap.

One calligraphy book I recently leafed through at the local library suggested scorching new nibs in a candle flame to remove their water-repellant coating. This struck me as a poor solution, since too much heat would cause the steel in the nibs to lose their temper and thus their springiness.

Tools and supplies included in the set

The four nibs (l-r): #5 roundhand, #3 roundhand, #5 poster, and copperplate

The four nibs (l-r): #5 roundhand, #3 roundhand, 8mm poster, and copperplate. The #5 has an ink reservoir clipped onto it which can be transferred to the other roundhand nib.

The nibs appear to be gold-plated, but rust on the shank of the #5 roundhand nib belies that fact that the underlying metal is plain (not stainless) steel. I don’t want to try the candle trick, but I would really like to get these working properly. I have a few solvents I can try to remove the coating, but if any of you have specific suggestions as to what to try…

I found one YouTube video that also suggests the scorching technique, but also rubbing alcohol, stabbing the nib into a raw potato repeatedly, and cleaning with toothpaste and an old toothbrush. Any of these might be viable on a copperplate nib, but the roundhand and poster nibs have internal surfaces that pretty much preclude any sort of mechanical cleaning. There is a big fat fingerprint clearly visible on the poster nib so clearly cleaning is a regular chore!

A Tiny Bird Nest Amidst the Tall Grass

Posted on 2015/07/04 by kpmartin Posted in Fauna, Kevin — 2 Comments ↓

Earlier this week I was picking some wild blackberries that grow along the fences and creek bed at the rear of our property when I ran across this tiny bird nest built on a tussock of tall grass. I only got a quick glance of the bird, tiny, brown, with huge terrified eyes, as it would run off into the nearby underbrush. There was no way of getting a picture of the bird without disturbing nearby vegetation and further exposing the nest. But I did get a photo of the nest and three eggs, along with a nickel for a size reference:

Sorry it is so blurry… Anyone have any idea what kind of bird owns this nest?

Sorting the Sorts

Posted on 2015/06/29 by kpmartin Posted in Equipment Acquisition, Repair, and Maintenance, Kevin, Matrix Markings — No Comments ↓

Now that I have the font display matrices in boxes, I have an assortment of sorts matrices to sort out and store. In addition to the sorts I also had a few cardboard boxes of unfiled small caps, odd sizes, and swash letters belonging to various regular fonts. Last week I bought another dozen Plano 3448 boxes for storing these, and managed to get most of these cleared up.

Many of these actually belonged with particular fonts, so I filed these with their appropriate font mats, and put surplus mats aside for later dispersal. The rest required flipping through the specimen books to find how they were classified and numbered there, because I wanted by boxing scheme to at least vaguely resemble the specimen book scheme. Most parentheses and brackets belonged with particular fonts, and the ones that didn’t (or, at least, the ones of those I have) turned out to be numbered as ornaments and are thus also listed in the ornaments specimens. Braces have their own unique numbering and got their own box. Symbols were placed in several boxes depending on which family (mathematical, commercial, etc) they belonged with. Some of the mats belong with particular fonts that I don’t have; I’ll be keeping these because I may eventually get the matching font. There are still several mats I have which do not appear in the specimen books. I will probably cast and proof them to identify what family they belong with before filing them away. Several of them are capital Greek letters for mathematical use (Σ and Π mainly) which are not part of the math symbols so perhaps they are just regular letters from a Greek font.

After all this I’ve used up the twelve boxes I bought last week, and still need a few more. They aren’t actually listed any more at the Sail web site so I suspect they may be discontinued, which means I’ll have to scrounge around in all the branches of the store I happen to drive by if I want more. I’ll be in Ottawa next week and can check out the store there, and on the way home the Oshawa store is just off the highway. Next time I got up to the Book Arts Guild of Richmond Hill, I can try the Vaughan branch too. I can corner the market in these boxes! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!