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 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 5GC1 in the casting, so it is likely part of a Giant Caster.
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.
Last Saturday (the 12th) 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.
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.
I was having a look at the creek behind our store to see how the heavy rain from the past few days had affected its level, and found a small patch of wild blackberries that were just starting to ripen.
Not a big haul, but Audrey and I shared them, and Lily ate a few once she was convinced that they were yummy. She still isn’t big on new foods…
They were tasty but the seeds formed a larger fraction of each berry compared to those in cultivated berries. I spent the next 20 minutes with a toothpick getting all the seeds cleared from between my teeth.
One of the things I noted when trying to electroform a Monotype matrix last May was that by the time I put that project on hold, half of my plating electrolyte had vanished. I was using an open tank so some of it may have been lost through evaporation.
In the intervening weeks I ran an informal test of the evaporation rate of water left open in my basement workshop, where I was doing the electroforming. Near the end of May, I filled an straight-sided open container partway with water, and marked the water level. Today I marked the water level again. Based on this time interval and the drop in water level, it seems that I should expect an open tank to lose about 5mm of depth per week.
In the particular tank I was using for electroforming, the surface area was 250cm² so this represents about 125ml of loss per week.
Given that altogether I lost 500ml in volume, and the tank was open for 3 or 4 weeks, that seems to correspond fairly well.
It should, however, be expected that a solution of electrolytes should have a somewhat lower evaporation rate than tap water so this still leaves the possibility that some of the water was lost through electrolysis. The temperature of the bath would have an effect as well. If the plating current heats up the bath that could speed evaporation. Unfortunately I never measured the bath temperature.
I have catalogued the contents of all the composition matcases, both the ones from Rich Hopkins and the dozen or so that I already had in various locations.
The cases have also been placed in their permanent home (barring major reorganizations), on top of the cabinets that contain my display mats.
There is room in this location for one more case before running into the overhead cabinet. They can’t extend further to the right because of an electrical outlet. In theory I could stack more in the left column because these are beyond the cabinet but that would make it more difficult to pull out the matcases. This is an inside corner of the room, and there are shelves just beyond the edge of the photograph along the other wall which prevent me from standing directly in front of the left-hand stack of cases.
As for cataloguing the contents of the matcases, I only noted the major fonts that were in each, typically including letters, figures (digits), and points (punctuation). Most of the cases were supplemented with other symbols including fractions, reference marks (§, †, ¶, etc.), and math symbols (+, =, ×, etc.). Some cases had open positions, where there was no mat at all, which is a disaster in waiting. If the machine should accidentally be directed to cast from one of these open positions, the entire volume of metal in the pump cylinder will squirt out, splashing molten metal all over and generally requiring a half-hour tear-down of the machine to remove all the solidified metal. As well, many of the cases were filled with random mats from any font, often placed inverted so they would typically cast a high space if accidentally selected.
The different font numbering systems used by Lanston (in the USA) and Monotype Corp. (in England) are turning out to be somewhat frustrating. In the Lanston numbering system, the face variants such as roman, italic, and small caps are differentiated by a suffix letter, so for instance mats marked 8 21E are the ones for 8-point Binny Old Style (#21) Roman (E), and there would be around 70 or 80 such mats (upper- and lower-case alphabets including diphthongs and ligatures, figures, and points) in a case. The same case might contain 26+ mats marked 8 21F (Small Caps, just one alphabet), and another 70 or 90 marked 8 21F (italic uc, lc, figures, and points). If the matcase has room there might be a bold font (marked J) as well, but in this example it would not be #21 because Binny Old Style does not come in bold. Instead it would be some naturally bolder face that complements Binny. To add a bit of confusion, the designations E, F, G, and H mean the same as A, B, C, and D except the former are “old style.” Despite being able to make this distinction I have yet to encounter a face that contains both some of A-D and also some of E-H. One other common variation is that the pointsize for figures is followed by F or G to distinguish hanging figures from lining ones. This numbering system has the advantage of disambiguating lowercase roman z (marked A or E) from small-caps Z (marked B or F) but it still does not help with uppercase O and zero, or lowercase l, uppercase I, and one.
The Monotype Corp. numbering uses the same markings for what Lanston would subclassify as A/B/C/D or E/F/G/H or J/K. So the same case mentioned above (using Times instead of Binny) would have all the alphabetics, figures, and points marked 8 327 (#327 is Times New Roman) whether they are roman, small caps, italic, or italic small caps. The boldface, if present, might be 8 334 (#334 is Times Bold). One advantage of the English mats is that the side of the mat has a larger flat area than Lanston mats, and so the markings are larger and thus clearer. But differentiating lowercase z from small-cap Z is well nigh impossible. The deeper drive of the English mats even makes peering at the face of the mat unhelpful.
Lanston kind of botched the numbering they use for display mats, relating an italic font to its roman counterpart by appending 1 (one) to the end of the face number, so 86 is Cheltenham Bold, and 861 is Cheltenham Bold Italic. Unfortunately they did not reserve the final 1 for italic faces, so 51 (Alternate Gothic No.1) is not the italic form of 5 (Post Text). If they had chosen I instead of 1, or better yet C to match the coding of composition mats, there would be no ambiguity. Another special marking is S as a suffix for “Swash” variants of some letters.
Although each of the composition mat numbering systems is internally consistent, trying to combine them into a single database of fonts is far from straightforward. I may get around this by prefixing all mat markings with a single letter to distinguish American composition, English composition, American display, and (eventually) English display mats.
The first set of five cases I made to hold Monotype composition matcases turned out to be insufficient to hold them all. I have since made two more cases, and have placed all the matcases I received from Rich Hopkins into them.
I have 29 free slots, but I also have a few more matcases from other sources floating around the shop to occupy these. Many of the matcases are marked with a twist of pipe cleaner, but Rich doesn’t remember their significance. I will take them all off since they prevent the matcases from going into their slots completely.
The cases are currently lying face-up on our pallet jack so I will be able to roll them to a nearby table so I can catalogue them. For now I have just loaded them into the slots as I unwrapped them, but once I have them catalogued I can sort them by face and note any duplicates.
I will also have to find a permanent place for these cases.
Last weekend, I put off making more composition matcase cases to give me time to make more of the pulp beating sticks we sell. How many I make depends on how large a piece of maple lumber I can get. This time the plank was about 7½″ wide and a little over 6′ long, so that was enough to make 4 beating sticks.
This process generates many odd-shaped scraps, which I glue up to eventually make endgrain blocks for wood engraving or perhaps some day I’ll make a font of wood type.
We seem to have a few squirrels around the neighbourhood that are neither black nor gray. Instead, their bodies are black and their tails fade through a reddish brown to sort of blond.
They seem a bit more skittish than the black ones so it is hard to get a good photo of them, but here are a few shots of one of them, who was collecting black walnuts from the nearby schoolyard and burying them in my yard.
Just after I took these photos, I saw one or two with similar colouration in the schoolyard.