the Papertrail – Page 34

Electroformed Matrix: the Reveal

Posted on 2014/09/04 by kpmartin Posted in Kevin, Matrix Making, Monotype Composition Caster — No Comments ↓

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 original matrix, the defective rubber mould, and the new matrix still attached to its rubber mould.

The matrix copy appears to have excellent detail.

Unfortunately, the matrix copy is not flat. Its front surface is domed and when placed face-down it rocks back and forth. I had thought this might be caused by the force required to peel it off its mould, but a subsequent attempt to flatten it demonstrates that it is not flexible enough for that to have occurred. The matrix was well adhered to its mould, so it would appear that the rubber mould must have also been in a dished shape.

I’m not sure what caused this. One possibility is that the rubber swelled a bit from water absorption on its back surface, while the front surface, sealed by the copper plating, retained its dimensions. Another possibility is that the copper plated under tension, gradually warping the piece and pulling the rubber with it.

The next task is to trim off most of the metal flash, and try to flatten the face of the mat using brute force. Once it is flattened I will fill the rear cavity (molten zinc has been suggested for this purpose) and finish machining the back.

Another composition caster rule repaired

Posted on 2014/08/25 by kpmartin Posted in Equipment Acquisition, Repair, and Maintenance, Kevin, Monotype Composition Caster, Other people — No Comments ↓

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 first rule repair, but it also gave me the pin to repair another broken rule. At the conference Rich Hopkins had (at my prior request) provided me with a collection of broken rules to repair, and I also picked one up at Firefly Press. It turned out that most of the dimensions I had determined earlier were only a couple of thousandths of an inch off. The only one that was way off was the spacing between the holes, where I was off by about 0.022″ which explained why I had to do some filing to make my first repair fit.

To make my own rivets I put a plain nail in my lathe and carefully turned it down to just under 0.093″ to fit the holes in the pin and rule.

I made a guess at how long the rivets had to be, cut the tiny rod using wire cutters and turned the ends square and flat on the lathe. I drilled a 0.093″ hole in a ¼″-thick steel plate, inserted each rivet blank in turn and struck it with a hammer several times to form a rivet head. I assembled the guide pin, rule, and two rivets and peened the plain ends of the rivets to hold everything together.

I had to support the guide pin on the ¼″ plate because of the step between the pin proper and its head. I filed the rivets smooth so the type could exit the type channel without snagging on them, and the assembled rule was ready for a test fitting on my caster.

I had already straightened the rule a bit, but the test fitting revealed that the rule had a bit of a twist as well, which I corrected by twisting it the opposite way using pliers, and now it moved smoothly up and down on my caster.

This leaves me with three more rules to repair (some are going back to Rich). I now have the correct dimensions to make my own guide pins with integrated rivets. The only other hitch is that the remaining rules still have the head of the broken guide pin riveted in place. This has to be removed without damaging the rivet holes in the rule.

Tagged with: Firefly Press, Rich Hopkins

Back from the ATF conference

Posted on 2014/08/25 by kpmartin Posted in American Typecasting Fellowship, Conferences and Meet-ups, Kevin, Other people, Type Casting — No Comments ↓

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 was hosted this year by Frank Romano, who has a long background in printing, starting in the declining days of hot metal, through phototypesetting, and into the modern era of digital printing. Frank had never even attended an ATF conference, so he was a bit lost as to how some of the organization should be done. This led to a bit of confusion setting up the swap meet, but on the plus side, he provided us with fantastic meals.

Thursday was spent at the Museum of Printing in North Andover MA (of which Frank is the president), where we had a series of presentations and plenty of opportunity to view the museum’s collection of letterpress and hot metal equipment. Stan Nelson was showing off his hand moulds, as well as demonstrating their use. In the evening we had a barbecue on their front lawn, with burgers, sausages, salad, beans, and excellent corn-on-the-cob.

Barbecue on the lawn at the Museum of Printing

On Friday, we had the swap meet and auction. Amongst the vendors there were Letterpress Things with a long table filled with goodies and Skyline Type’s sampling of new type and ornaments. During a lull at this venue, I passed around the mat I had tried to electroform, and peeled it from its rubber master for the big reveal.

A stitched panorama of the swap meet

Saturday was spent at Frank Romano’s private library of printing-related books and artifacts. As on Thursday, the day was a mix of presentations and perusal of the collection.

Xxxx showing some of his Cherokee type casting items at the Romano Library.

Ed Rayher discussing his Cherokee type casting project at the Romano Library.

More of the Romano Library, with Sky Shipley looking though an old specimen book

On both the 13th and the 17th, John Kristenesen was hosting an open house at Firefly Press in Boston. There he has a Super Caster, Thompson, Composition Caster, and Linotype along with several presses and a heap of parts. Visitors from ATF were welcome to scrounge through some of the parts collection and matrix fonts for freebies.

At the conference I got some Monotype comp caster parts of interest to me, including a brand new Rule Guide Pin c39F1 at the swap meet, and at Firefly, some parts for the Lead & Rule attachment, particularly the Mould Blade Micrometer Wedge assembly (X51B), and the special pump body (Xu23H) required for the moulds used. I also found at Firefly four expanding quoins used to replace stacks of furniture in sparsely-filled chases and a part for the oddball clutch on my composition caster. More information on these goodies will follow once they have been cleaned up for their portraits.

Tagged with: Firefly Press, Frank Romano, Museum of Printing, Rich Hopkins

Our New Baby!

Posted on 2014/08/24 by kpmartin Posted in Equipment Acquisition, Repair, and Maintenance, Printing, Sigwalt Chicago No 11, Us — 2 Comments ↓

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 having a clearance sale), and we bought it:

Daaawwww! Isn’t it cute? It is a Sigwalt Chicago No. 11 press, with chase inside dimensions 2½×3⅞″—if it actually had a chase. It is also missing its form roller trucks, but other than that is is complete and appears to be in working order. The rollers themselves seem to be in good condition, and I can make trucks for them easily. I can also make a chase but that is a little more work. In particular, getting the lugs that hold the chase on the bed just right might be a bit fussy.

According to the manual I downloaded, this press originally cost $12.00 (year unknown), including some type, furniture, ink, bronzing powder and storage box.

When I have a chance I will take it apart to give it a good cleaning and oiling. If I feel ambitious I might even make a case for it so we can take it to shows easily.

That Goodwill store was unlike any I had ever seen before. Other than the gems like this press which they put aside to sell through Kijiji, they just have a large room with rows of large bins on wheels. Every few minutes they take all the bins in a row into the back room and bring out replacements. At that time it looks like a flock of vultures swooping in to pick all the good stuff. They sell everything by weight, and these people, who spend hours there, probably run second-hand or antique shops and they are looking for items they feel they can sell at a profit. I have to wonder if Goodwill is getting a fair share of the value of what they sell, but with the volume they go through, this seems like the only practical way to handle things.

Brake repairs on the car

Posted on 2014/08/10 by kpmartin Posted in Kevin, Vehicles — No Comments ↓

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, though, vehicles became more complex to service, and I had better things to do with my time so I migrated over to having a repair shop do most of the work. Finding a shop that I liked and trusted helped a lot too.

Lately, however, I’ve been finding that repairs are getting pretty expensive. Both my car and my truck are over ten years old, so they are getting to that stage where repairs can get a little more involved.

A few months ago the rear brakes on our car started to make a horrible scraping/screeching noise when applied. I had also been getting the ABS warning light showing occasionally. A quick inspection confirmed that new rear brake pads were required. I had already spent quite a bit on some other vehicle repairs, so I decided to replace the pads myself. For the benefit of anyone searching the internet for car repair tips, our car is a 2001 VW Golf GLS with 2L gasoline engine, produced for the Canadian market. I know of at least one part, the exhaust flex pipe, which seems to require the aftermarket part designated for 2002 models rather than that for 2001s.

I had no trouble removing the calipers to get at the pads, but this is the first time I had serviced rear disk brakes, which include the parking brake mechanism. In order to make room for the new thick pads, the pistons had to be retracted back into the caliper, but the parking brake mechanism meant that the they could not just be pushed straight back in. A special tool is required which not only pushes on the piston but also turns it, essentially screwing it back onto the parking brake actuator system. Fortunately these tools are readily available and soon I had everything reassembled with the brakes working nice and quiet again.

Over the ensuing months, the brakes developed a substantial pulsation. This was not a smooth pulsation, but a quite abrupt clunking as the wheel rotated (with accompanying pulsations felt at the pedal). We would be leaving on a long car trip soon, so I had to have another look at the brakes.

By jacking up first one rear wheel then the other, and gently applying the parking brake, I identified which side had the problem. It was the same side that had the metal-on-metal contact from a completely worn pad before I replaced the pads. I removed the wheel and the caliper, and this time I also removed the brake disk. The rear face of the disk had apparently developed a scale of corrosion before the pads were replaced, and now most of the scale had come off, leaving two patches of scale making the disk thicker in those places. The scale was perhaps half a millimetre thick. I chipped off the rest of the scale using the crude approach of banging on it with the head of the lug wrench. The rest of the scale came off pretty easily. I also use compressed air to blow out dust and metal filings from the ABS wheel speed sensor. With everything reassembled, we now get nice smooth stops again.

I was hoping that cleaning the speed sensor would get rid of the ABS warning light but it has not. I think I’ll have to fork out some money to get the local VW dealer to read the diagnostic codes from the ABS controller so I have a better idea what it is complaining about. One other thing I noticed while doing this second repair is that the rubber dust boot on the piston was torn, probably damaged during the piston retraction of the first repair. I suspect that before retracting the pistons I should have loosened and lubricated the groove where the boot engages in the piston so the boot would not twist along with the piston. I guess I should fix these before winter, but that work is more involved because the piston must be removed, which then entails bleeding the air out of the hydraulic system.

Monotype Galley Fence Repair

Posted on 2014/08/10 by kpmartin Posted in Equipment Acquisition, Repair, and Maintenance, Kevin, Monotype Composition Caster — 1 Comment ↓

The Monotype caster has a part called a fence which separates the accumulating line of type from previous lines already pushed onto the galley. This fence has a guide pin at the rear end which fits into a hole in the right type channel block to keep the fence in position as it is raised and lowered as part of the sequence of motions that push a completed line of type onto the galley.

Normally this pin gets pretty light duty, but it can be broken if the matcase is improperly inserted into the caster and the ribbon calls for casting a matrix in the first (NI) column and one of the near-bottom rows (14 or 15). The matrix positioning mechanism will push the matcase into this pin, shearing it off and bending the rule. Generally the caster jams and stalls at that point, and getting it unjammed can be quite a job. Once things are unjammed, the fence can be replaced and you can get on with casting, this time with the matcase properly engaged in the positioning lugs.

The fence itself is generally springy enough to recover its straightness, unless too much force was applies while trying to unjam things. Even if it remains slightly bowed, it can be straightened. The problem is replacing the guide pin, a part not readily available. The stub of the broken pin will will remain on the end of the fence, held in place by two small rivets, whose heads have been ground down flush making them quite hard to spot. These rivets can be drilled out, preferably from the back side so only the broken stub of the pin and not the fence itself is damaged if the drill wanders off course a bit. The holes in the fence are tapered and drilling into them could lose most of the taper.

I had a broken fence at this stage, with the pin stub and rivets removed, which I found while helping Rich Hopkins clean out his shed a bit when I was visiting in May. I decided to repair it to see how much trouble it would be.

I made the replacement pin in a single piece, with a couple of projecting pegs instead of separate rivets. I started with a length of ¼″ square keystock, and used the lathe to turn the round pin, keeping some of the original square shape to form a head that would attach to the fence. I turned the pin off center in the keystock so all of the excess metal in the head would be on one side of the pin. I also used the lathe to cut both the pin and the head to the correct length. Then I clamped the part in the vise on my mill, and used a CNC milling program to cut away most of the excess metal on the head, leaving two pegs in the correct positions to match the rivet holes in the fence. A bit of a miscue on the height of the part meant that I also milled a thin shaving off the top of my milling vise.

As it turned out the pegs didn’t quite have the right spacing between them and would not both fit together into the holes on the fence. I used a small file on one of the pegs to reduce its diameter on one side until they fit into the fence and the head of the pin seated fully against the fence. Then I placed the end of the fence on an anvil and use the ball side of a ball-pein hammer to flatten down the pegs, forming rivet heads in the tapered holes of the fence. I filed the excess rivet heads off until they were flush with the surface of the fence, so that type would not snag or get damaged as it slides by this point on the fence.

Rear and front views of the repaired fence (above) and a used factory original (below).

Altogether the repair looks good and feels solid. Once I do this on a couple more fences I should have the peg spacing adjusted properly so no filing is required. Then I can make several of these pins available for other caster owners who need their fences mended.

Freeness Testing Demonstration

Posted on 2014/08/04 by kpmartin Posted in Kevin, Pulp preparation, Test Equipment — 2 Comments ↓

A while ago we had a spare freeness tester for sale, and for the occasion I had started making a video demonstrating how they work and how they are used.

We have since sold the tester but I never finished the video.

I finally got around to doing the final editing this morning, so here it is:

You can also watch it directly on YouTube.

Last Chance for some Monotype Parts

Posted on 2014/07/24 by kpmartin Posted in Sold, Type Casting — 1 Comment ↓

Last weekend I sorted through my stash of Monotype parts and decided that a few of these were not worth saving. If anyone wants these you have until September to make arrangements to pick them up for free. I can bring them along to the ATF conference in Salem next month as well.

If they aren’t gone by the fall they’re going for scrap.

Generally these are parts that essentially never break or wear out, or that don’t seem to be made for any common machinery. Several of them appear to be parts for the Giant Caster, which sold only a few and even fewer are still around.

This seems to be a mechanism for holding something with only three degrees of freedom. The object can rotate about a single horizontal axis and move in a plane perpendicular to that axis. It could be part of some sort of casting equipment but I have no clue what.

These are four unknown levers. The longest is about 25cm (10″) long.

Another unknown part, although I suspect it may be part of a Giant Caster.

A lever which is marked xxx in the casting, so it is likely part of a Giant Caster.

A lever which is marked 5GC1 in the casting, so it is likely part of a Giant Caster.

A mold base for a Giant Caster. It appears to be in good shape, other than bits of newspaper glued to it by old mould oil.

A mould base for a Giant Caster. It appears to be in good shape, other than bits of newspaper glued to it by old mould oil.

Another Giant Caster part, two cams on a shared hub, this time with a paper sticker marked 83GC1.

The swing frame from a composition caster. This is the moving part of the hinge that the metal pot pivots out on.

This appears at first glance to be the main bridge casting and third leg for a Composition Caster, except that is has no mounting for the mastcase lifter and no provision for the front-mounted alignment adjustment knobs. It is stamped with serial number 3837, so it is fairly early production, but I thought even the earliest Composition Casters came with the lifter and alignment controls. It is clearly used, as the shadow outline of the American-style low quad mechanism can be seen.

A bad weekend for mechanical work

Posted on 2014/07/22 by kpmartin Posted in Kevin, Vehicles — No Comments ↓

Last Saturday (the 12^th) I changed the drive chain on my motorcycle. It was unevenly worn and it was impossible to adjust the tension without having the chain too tight in part of its circuit and too loose at others. Of course, the chain is about 27 years and 32,000km old, so it doesn’t owe me anything. As far as I know it is the original from when I bought the bike new in 1988. Obviously, I don’t ride much.

This was my first time at using a chain breaker, both to remove the old chain, and to adjust the replacement to the correct number of links. That went without any hitches.

Assembling the master link was, however, a bit of a challenge. The chain has O-rings on each link to keep dirt out and lubricant in, and to put the clip onto the master link, these O-rings had to be compressed enough. There are special tools to do this but I didn’t have one. I eventually found a tip on the Internet, to place one of the side plates removed from the old chain over the pins of the master link and squeeze with a clamp. The extra plate allows the clamp to press on the master link’s side plate rather than its pins. That got the link closed properly, and after getting the tension adjusted on the new chain, I found that all the bending over and peering sideways had throw out my lower back. I spent the rest of the day (and much of today as well) sitting, standing, and walking very carefully.

Once my back is better I’ll take the bike out for a spin and re-check the chain tension.

Then on Sunday I mowed most of my lawn, but just as I was getting close to done the belt that drives the mower dropped off its pulley. Fortunately only a small out-of-sight section of the lawn remained uncut. Once all the belts and pulleys had cooled off I found that the bearings on the main drive sheave of the mower were completely shot. The shaft was so loose that there was little belt tension and the pulley was way out of line with the belt. I already knew that the blade spindles had too much play in them but with this bearing gone as well it might be worth getting a new lawn tractor. If only the bearings themselves need replacement, it would cost be about $100 in parts to fix, but if other parts such as the shafts and pulleys are worn, it would cost a lot more. I might be saved by a Kijiji ad for the same model of tractor (John Deere 185) for sale. The pictures make it look like it is in better condition than mine, but it remains to be seen what condition the mower deck is in.

Maple Mould and Deckle Sets

Posted on 2014/07/08 by kpmartin Posted in Kevin, Moulds and Deckles, Things we sell — No Comments ↓

This week I’m making a few of our large (8½×11″) Maple Mould and Deckle sets. We’re out of stock on them, and we might be getting an order for a few soon so I thought I should try to keep ahead of things for a change.

Normally I buy the maple already milled to ¾″ square stock but this time I’m making a small batch and wanted to avoid the minimum shop time charge from my supplier. Altogether there are about ten steps to making these sets (depending on how precisely one wants to define the steps) from rough wood, or six steps from prepared ¾″ stock. I’m at the point now where I have to cut the wood to length and form the finger-joint ends on all the pieces. Fortunately I have special jigs for my table saw to make these two steps fast and accurate.