#Typemetal mix manual#

The cast metal would be routed and trimmed for square and good relief of the metal for the weekly press run. Operated this for many years in the 1970s. The mouth piece of the machine also had an element and handle to activate the flow of metal. The Hammond was electric, with an element not unlike what is inside of an electric hot water heater. These narrow bars were used to feed the linotypes. A few narrow casts were always made first to heat the mold to the proper temp. The mold clamped shut and placed vertical to receive the molten lead from the waiting pot of molten lead, through the mouthpiece directly above the prepared opening of the mold.

The paper needed to be wider than the mat and extend beyond the type high bearers. The brown paper strip, taped with brown mailing (paper tape). The mat that had the advertisement pressed into it would be fixed with brown paper strip. Mostly grocery ads for IGA, real estate etc. There is I believe still a Hammond Easy Caster setting in Colebrook, New Hampshire for making the Letterpress Newspaper cast metal. Maybe this is all a mystery to people now, but it was once the daily bread and butter of mainly newspaper printing. I did a time and motion study once in the stereotyping department at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and watched on a number of occasions the rolling of mats, getting them ready, and the casting process on automatic casting equipment. And there was a yearly mat service that shipped a large box of mats for seasonal material that could be incorporated into advertisements. Stereotype equipment is around, there’s even a complete setup here in our town in the back shop of what was the newspaper, and if there was some compelling reason a cast had to be made, it can still be done, even the hand poured method AdLib described but with the casting bars securely clamped to his steel backing surface.Įvery weekly newspaper printed by letterpress had to make castings every week as they received their national and even regional ads in the form of mats that had to be cast. Tom Parsons, who is setting up a letterpress shop in the historic Littleton, Colorado railroad station, just posted some pictures of a shop that was donated to his endeavor:Īnd included in the equipment was a modern, and very nice looking Nolan flat caster, similar to the Hammond Easy Caster, and what appears to be a Vandercook block leveller, and that could be used to surface the backs of cast stereos to type high. :o)Īs to those ready to pounce about the use of chalk plates, well, look to those components. Very attractive, historic, and, properly explained, a source of wonderment to the ‘instant’ ‘puter generation not to mention the polyplate crowd. Should you not have access to proper caster, bobeng, I suggest you shellack the mats, mount them in period frame, them place them in prominent spot on a featured wall.

#Typemetal mix manual#

The large size mats described, although I have seen small shops equipped with appropriate-sized manual caster, were more often reproduced via an automatic machine such as those employed by the larger newspapers and typesetting houses. Has anyone wondered why the smaller mats always had a piece of gummed paper tape attached to them? Or how it was a curved stereo (to fit a web press), having minimum distortion, was obtained from a flat forme? :o) A stereocaster is a heated box, of substantial heft to provide suitable ‘heat sink’, having heat controlled according to typemetal composition, and is not a skill easily mastered. Simply pouring hot metal onto the mat will merely scorch the surface, cool too quickly to allow proper flow - thus inadequate coverage - and should any impression actually reveal, the image will be ‘rounded’ to the point of bare readability. Each ingredient has specific purpose in producing clean, crisp, sharp image. There is a reason for the amalgam of lead, tin, antimony in typemetal. The procedure of pouring hot metal onto an open mat reveals also very limited understanding of typemetal or, for that matter, common lead. (Imagine that weight of the 24x24 mats!) And, depending upon one’s agility at trimming said cast, a router could also aid blemish-free cast by reducing shoulders. (Dilettantes notwithstanding, common three-quarter inch ply was most employed) Or, the mats could be cast type high. Said bars could easily be machined to allow a printer choice of available wood mount. In most of the smaller shops, bearer bars provided accurate height of the casting. :o) Yes, a stereocaster is an essential piece of equipment, but a surfacing machine is certainly not. AdLib’s method reveals he has probably read a brief descript of a stereo recovery but has never actually reproduced same.