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.

I have completed my five cases for holding Monotype composition matcases. Despite my efforts to get the grooves uniformly deep, I found after assembling the cases that some grooves were too shallow. This meant that I spent a lot of time fitting the partitions, either trimming their width at a bit of an angle when they were tight at the back of the case, or using a handsaw to deepen the grooves near the front of the case.

The assembled cases, glued and nailed, waiting for the glue to dry. I was originally planning on gluing the partitions at the same time, but the two partitions in this photo are all that are left of that idea.

The cases with the fitted partitions inserted with glued edges. The clamps are there to avoid having the top and bottom of the cases bowed out from the curvature of the plywood. Once the glue dries, the partitions will hold the sides in.

The five cases face up on the floor all loaded up. Many of the matcases have a twist of pipe cleaner on them, but I don’t know the significance of this.

They look quite nice, even if I did not apply any finish to the wood. The matcases either come flush to the front of the case or stick out about ⅜″.

The problem? They’re full and I still have at least 18 matcases to store! I should have made 7 rather than 5! Although I have enough lumber to make two more they’ll have to wait a few days because I have to make some pulp beating sticks.

I returned from picking up my display matrix purchases with several matcases of composition mats as well, and so far I have no good place to keep them. The few I had have been stored in the same drawer as the box of display mats of the same face, but many of the new matcases contain faces that I don’t have in display sizes.

To keep these organized I am making a set of five cases that can hold 24 matcases each. Each one is essentially an open-sided box about 4″ high, 8″ deep and 24″ wide, with vertical partitions dividing the space into 24 compartments, each just the right size to hold a matcase.

The case is made with ½″ (actually 12mm) birch plywood and the partitions are ⅛″ hardboard. Most of the case will be assembled with butt joints but the partitions will be set into grooves cut in the top, back, and bottom of the cabinet. I was hoping I could cut the grooves on larger panels of plywood before cutting up the individual pieces, but partway through doing that I noticed that the grooves were not always full depth. The plywood had a bit of waviness in it and I could not apply enough pressure consistently to hold the sheet tight to the saw table.

Instead I had to cut up the individual tops, backs, and bottoms and groove them all individually. One I got into the groove (har har) I found this was just as fast as grooving the full panels anyway. But still it was 5 cases times 3 pieces times 23 grooves to cut.

Here are all the case pieces and partitions, almost ready for assembly. The only things to do are to bevel the edges of the partitions so they go into the grooves cleanly and sand the splinters off the edges of the case parts.

Photos of the finished cases are forthcoming!