letterpress

Type founding extravaganza

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

It's been a busy and exciting week or two spent in the greater Saint Louis area. First up was the biennial conference of the American Typefounding Fellowship. It was great to catch up with folks I'd met over the years as well as get to know some new faces, too. The mood was decidedly upbeat and I had some good conversations about some of my ongoing projects (such as the composition caster automation project). The final day involved a torrent of storm water, a bridge made from an old truck trailer and a muddy track through the woods not unlike a rally course (oh, and also the obligatory tour of the Skyline Type Foundry).

Following the conference, I stayed in town for Thompson Tech III, in an attempt to get more comfortable with the machine that's been lurking in the corner of the shop for two years. The class consisted of myself and David Smith, as well as the illustrious George Hamilton and Stan Nelson. It was great fun getting to work with everyone, including Sky and Johanna Shipley, our gracious hosts. The long evenings of fascinating stories told by "around the campfire" would have made the trip worthwhile on its own, but to top it off, we were casting good type all week. Overall, the week went very smoothly (I was the only one to have had any drama, a very mild burn on my arm), and I'm feeling pretty good about the possibility of getting my Thompson up and running in short order.

Type Foundry update

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 12:31:49 -0400

It's been a while since an update on my type foundry plans has appeared here, so I thought it might be good to recap some of the latest developments.

It's been a busy few months; we finally finished the floor in the foundry area after winter set in early. A new entrance door was cut in the concrete wall in order to allow equipment to be moved in. We moved the two English casters in May and they're awaiting a plan for getting them off their pallets.

About the time we were moving things in, I got a call about a Thompson typecaster down in North Carolina (at Heritage Letterpress, who was in the process of shutting down their hot metal operation). I went down with Ian Schaefer who was picking up a composition caster. We pooled our resources for the big move and spent all night driving the truck back to Pennsylvania. We also got lots of spares and some nice composition and display mats. I've also started a Matrix Inventory to keep track of what faces and sizes I've got. There are still a few faces that I have mats but no wedges, so I'm still on the lookout for those. If you've got spares, drop me a line!

Finally, I have a first pass at a keyboard emulator up and running. This piece of software is designed to fix a lot of the shortcomings of working with the standard pneumatic keyboard, yet still retain the flavor of working in a traditional way. It will output files that can be sent to the caster driving software (not quite written yet) for final casting. Eventually, I'll adapt the keyboard sofware into something that can take a standard text input file and turn it into an "e-ribbon" for casting.

I guess that about sums up the latest happenings; lots of stuff going on, and I'm excited about finally getting some of these projects wrapped up!

All hot metal, all the time...

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 15:18:22 -0500

This past weekend, my father and I spent some time getting the gas pot on my composition caster fired up. We had a few hair raising moments due to the fact that one of the three gas orifices had been removed, resulting in a giant flame-up about 20 seconds after lighting the burner. After replacing the orifice (which was safely tucked away in a spare parts box) and brazing a small burn hole in one of the mixing chambers.

Well rested and ready for a second go, we put everything back together Sunday. Luckily, things went much more smoothly. In fact, we got the pot filled about 2/3 of the way with freshly melted type. We just need to make sure the thermostatic gas control is adjusted and we'll be ready to clean the pump and make some type!

how to move a monotype

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 20:25:14 -0500

I recently moved a small Monotype composition setup from Dave Clinger's shop upto my "barn" in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The whole process began in early September when I heard from Rich Hopkins that Dave was looking to find a new home for some of his equipment. After a few back and forth emails, we came to an agreement and I started making plans. Things ended up being busy for me, so we ended up settling on picking things up on a Saturday in early November. Neither of us wanted to get stuck working in bad weather, so we couldn't really put it off any longer.

The Game Plan

The event ended up being a marathon weekend. Luckily, I planned ahead and took Monday off from work in order to give myself some time to tie up any loose ends. My "assistant" for the move was my father. He actually rearranged his vacation so that he could meet up with me in Baltimore… truth be told, I think he enjoys these "adventures" as much as I do! We started out in Baltimore on Saturday morning around 8AM. I had reserved a one-way 20 foot straight truck from Budget, and the plan was to pick it up, drive to Richmond to load everything up, and then drive it all back to Pennsylvania, a total of around 600 miles. No matter how you look at it, it was destined to be a long day. The drive to Richmond was relatively non-eventful, the weather was sunny and surprisingly warm. Our truck was a relatively new diesel, and gave us no problems (which is somewhat unusual, based on past rental experiences).

The pickup would be split into two parts: the caster was stored at the farm of Dave's son in law. The keyboard and all of the ancillary equipment was in Dave's shop in downtown Richmond. The plan was to pick up the caster first, as we felt that it would be the most likely source of problems during loading. After the caster was loaded, we'd travel to Dave's shop to pick up the rest of the items before heading north. Dave estimated that we could be back on the road in 2 and a half hours, but that proved to be overly optimistic, if only because we ended up doing a fair amount of chatting before and after.

The farm is right in the middle of plantation country, and the drive in was quite picturesque. By the time we backed the truck around to the building where the caster was stored, Dave and his Son in law had the caster loaded onto a forklift. It seems that the strange goings on had brought the whole family out...

Preparing the caster for travel

Make sure that you have drained the oil from the oil pan. The oil pan spills very easily, and you'll be doing yourself a big favor by making sure that there isn't any left to drip out.

Remove the pump and mould, if possible. Crank the pot up and use rope to tie the pot securely to the caster.

If there's any possibility that the machine will be exposed to humidity or wet conditions, it's wise to coat the exposed surfaces with a good quality penetrating oil spray (WD-40 will probably work for short trips, but for anything longer than a few hours, you'll want something better, like "Sprayon Penetrating Oil and Lubricant," which I've found works wonders and is available from Grainger.

Once you've prepared the machine, you'll need to get it ready for loading. While there are several possible ways to do that, the following technique is fairly simple and has worked well for me on several occasions. Your mileage may vary.

Materials required: pallet, plywood, 2x4s, screws, large hook eyes and ratchet straps.

Find a good sturdy 42" or 48" wooden pallet. If you're planning on building a full crate for your caster, you'll need the larger, as the caster is almost exactly four feet square. The pallet should be in good condition, and the sturdier, the better. You'll want one built with at least 2" material for the uprights.
Lay a sheet of 1/2" or 3/4" plywood cut to the size of the palette down on top of the palette and screw down. The purpose of this piece of plywood is two fold: it provides extra rigidity also prevents anything from spilling through the cracks in the palette decking. This is extra important if you're planning on building a full crate.
Position the caster squarely on the palette. Exactly how you do this will depend on the rigging equipment at your disposal. The easiest method is to use a forklift, though we've had success with steel pipes used as rollers. If you're using a forklift that has adjustable forks, you can bring the forks together so that the forks slide into the opening in the base of the caster that forms the "feet" of the caster. That way, you can just pick it up and put it down onto the pallet without have to use bars to get the caster off of the forks.
Butt and screw 6-8" lengths of 2x4 to the up aginst the four sides of the caster base. These wooden blocks will prevent the caster from twisting or creeping on the pallet.
Strap the caster to the pallet using ratchet straps and screw eyes (you'll want ones that are #2 or heavier, and at least 2 1/2 inches long. Your goal is to attach one strap to each side of the caster. Avoid running the strap over any delecate parts; there are 2 or 3 very obvious spots, including one or two large holes in the frame. Drill a pilot hole through the plywood into the pallet frame, making sure to catch the uprights. Attach the eyes and tighten. Hook up the ratchet straps and tighten until snug. You should end up with something that looks like http://hww3.smugmug.com/gallery/963021/1/44309962/Large.

If you're loading the caster into a rental truck that has a wooden floor, you may want to screw some wooden blocks up against the pallet so that it doesn't "walk" around while in transit. Most rental trucks have walls that aren't built to withstand any amount of force, so any strapping of the caster to the walls will be a primarily psycological endeavour. Nonetheless, it's probably a good idea to strap the caster to the walls, in order to counteract any tendency to tip. This might be a good time to mention that the whole object here is to make the laws of physics work for you. Everything we've done has been designed to lower the center of gravity of the caster and to make it less likely to tip over. Remeber that it's far easier to prevent a heavy object from tipping over than it is to stop it once it's started to move.

Loading and unloading the caster

With the caster strapped securely, the next task is to get it into the truck. By far the easiest method is to use a forklift. Many rental trucks have liftgates, but this is an extremely risky approach, as the weight of the caster is often close to the capacity of a properly maintained liftgate, which is often not the state yours will probably be in. Additionally, liftgates tend to tip down due to weight hanging off the end of the lift platform.

So, let's say a forklift isn't an option… what are the other possibilities? If you have access to a loading dock, rental trucks (other than U-Hauls) are often dock-high, which should get you within a few inches. A pallet jack can be used to roll the pallet onto the truck. Alternately, you can use pipe rollers to move the pallet onto the truck.

Instead of using a rental truck, a trailer might be a better option. If you have access to a pickup truck with sufficient towing capacity, U-Haul rents a very servicable dual axle trailer that's low enough to the ground that you can fashion a ramp and either roll the pallet onto the trailer or use a come-along to winch the pallet onto the truck. A key consideration when using this approach is to avoid stressing the pallet.

Finally, a roll-back tow truck can be used to load (or unload) a caster, and then either transported directly, or for longer distance moves, transferred to a rental truck. There are usually a few inches difference between a roll-back and a truck bed, but this can be overcome with blocks and rollers. I've used this approach with casters (and presses, as well) with very good success.

Obviously, on its own, a caster will be a little top-heavy. Hopefully, you've strapped it sufficiently to a good quality pallet so that you will have effectively lowered the caster's center of gravity. I've moved a few of these machines very long distances using this technique, and haven't had any problems.

The Triumphant Arrival

We arrived at the farm in Pennsylvania around 3:30 AM. We had pre-positioned a car at the barn so that we could park the truck and drive home in relative comfort. We arrived at home at 4:00 AM, and I don't remember my head hitting the pillow.

Things started back up at the farm around 9AM when Grant, a friend of the family, arrived with his roll-back tow truck. The plan was to roll the caster onto the tow truck using a pallet jack. Once it was on the roll-back, we would drive around the side of the building to the door; tip the bed back and slide the pallet with the caster into the barn. There was a slight difference in height between the two trucks, so it took a little bit of coaxing to get it across. This where it really helps to have a solid pallet, because we were able to tie a cable around the pallet and winch it across. In less than 15 minutes, we had the caster transferred to the roll-back and unloaded into the barn. It took another 90 minutes to unload the rest of the items; I've decided that loading and unloading the keybars were my least favorite part of the process.

It might also be worth talking briefly about how we moved the keyboard. Two people can move a Monotype keyboard; which weighs about 300 pounds. You'll want to remove the keybanks, stop bars and other assorted items from the keyboard. Be careful that during the process you don't bend any of the keybar rods that are exposed… you can render a keyboard completely useless with very little effort.

Once all of the extra parts have been removed, two people can lift the keyboard off of its stand (simply lift it up, and it should slide right off). We moved the keyboard from place to place by putting it onto a hand truck that we kept low to the ground.

monotype adventures

Wed, 2 Nov 2005 18:11:11 -0500

October 4, 2007

Over the weekend, I made a special trip up to the shop in order to get the last remaining piece of the casting automation puzzle set up: the caster cycle input. I'm using a magnetic reed switch, and am using the action of the air bar clamp activation rod (Ian, you'll have to provide the official nomenclature) to detect a casting cycle. The attachment ended up being pretty elegant. I just need to run some tests to ensure the switch is spaced properly from the activating magnet, otherwise the cycle timing will be off. Hopefully it won't matter too much when the caster is at speed.

The air bar adapter turned out to work very well without having to make any alterations to the receiving caster, and it takes about 10 minutes to install the whole system (assuming you're not disconnecting all of the air hoses), with the only tools required being a screwdriver (and maybe a pair of pliers if your grip isn't very good). I personally don't anticipate swapping very often, as the whole motivation for me is my inadequate keyboard and accessories.

I just put some finishing touches on the caster control program this evening, and everything looks set (using the simulated interface, but the real thing should work as well.) That means I should be casting from the computer this coming weekend. I can hardly wait, and I might take a vacation day Friday to work on it.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with the way things turned out; it's taken a bit longer than anticipated, but I think the wait was worth it. The only things left are some cosmetic bundling of the "air spaghetti" and to mount the controller and air manifold somewhere out of the way (maybe hang them from the ceiling.)

I've also been making good progress on the "e-ribbon" generator. I have a simple keyboard emulator, and I think the initial focus will be a simple application that reads a text file with caster control codes embedded in it (ala HTML) to control the ribbon generator. I really don't see the benefit in going down the WYSIWYG path, though I might create a visualization tool that allows one to see the alignment of the lines in a job. That would make it possible to detect rivers and other undesirable artifacts without having to cast and proof a job.

I've got a few photos related to all of this activity… first, a screenshot of the casting application after an "e-ribbon is loaded, and one during the simulated casting session. Additionally, a snapshot of the airbar adapter (apologies for the less than artistic photo, my father was apparently not paying close attention to what he was doing).

August 5, 2007

We spent the afternoon hooking up the new Super Caster. The motor controller box somehow got misplaced during the equipment move, leaving only a pair of control buttons on the front of the machine, so we had to make alternate arrangements. Luckily, my uncle is an industrial electrician, and he volunteered to find a suitable substitute. He came through with flying colors, and even installed everything. We also wired the pot and verified that the heating elements are working. That just leaves the water hookup and compressed air for colling the mould and matrix, respectively. Exciting times!

July 17, 2007

The caster control board prototypes have both been verified, and everything seems to work as expected. There are a few items I'd like to change, so I might do a second revision. Things such as flipping the connectors over so I can use right angle jacks; making the power connection a jack instead of a terminal block (that way I can use power supplies akin to laptop power bricks) and adding a circuit to keep the caster-side electronics powered down until a usb connection is made. Oh, and there were one or two minor changes I made to the PCB on the fly. It makes for an ugly reverse side, but it works.

I also verified that all of the valves work, but some of them seem to have restricted airflow, so I'm going to swap them out. Then it's just a matter of a day or two at the machine to get everything hooked up.

As if I didn't have enough to do, I thought about making a custom control panel with buttons that correspond directly to buttons in the GUI. It's probably not that hard to do, mostly a matter of ripping an old keyboard apart and fastening the right switches to a panel. Well, maybe that's a project for once everything's up and running, eh?

For the curious, I've added a photo of the finished board. As a side note, this board would also work well for anyone needing 31 channels of digital output… lots of physical control ideas come to mind...

June 5-12, 2007

Started adding some CasterControl notes. The PCB design has been validated and I'm able to control the valves via computer. I'm just waiting on a resistor and a few more quick disconnects and the electro-mechanical interface will be complete. Wiring up the cables and valves has proven to be a time consuming and tedious chore; each wire needs to be identified, stripped, crimped and inserted into the appropriate connector frame. I figure the cables and valves will probably take about 2-3 hours each (there are 3 for each valve bank).

I also finished a first pass at the low level IO glue, which will allow the valve bank to be controlled by a higher level computer language (pike). Initially, the interface will monitor for caster readiness by polling; eventually, I'd like to have the interface report asynchronously when a code change is required. It's probably not a necessary enhancement, but it will make things a little bit more elegant.

As soon as I get some time during the day, I'll take some photos of everything. For now, you can look at the pre-production board layout below.

May 30, 2007

A few items of note this past week:

The first pair of prototype circuit boards arrived from the fabricator. It looks like some time will be spent this weekend stuffing the parts onto the board. Hopefully, it won't be a complete failure.

Last weekend, my father and I headed out to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to pick up a pair of Monotype Supercasters from the Woodside press. They're now safely resting in the shop, and I'll try to get them sited this weekend, as well.

May 2, 2007

Over the past year or so, I've been working on a computer interface for use with the typesetting system I've been working on. Finding an off the shelf interface that meets my criteria has been somewhat difficult. There have been a few "close, but no cigar"s.

In the end, I decided to design my own. With 31/1 isolated out/inputs and a USB interface, this is a good bit more complicated than anything I've done before. The most recent spurt of activity has taken up all of my evenings for the past few weeks, and I'm pleased to report that it's almost done. The hardest part has been laying out the circuit board, but I'm 95% there, and I thought it might be fun to show off what I have so far.

Please be gentle, I'm not a professional layout technician, so I relied heavily on auto-routing, with a fair amount of cleanup afterward. I have a fairly high level of confidence that this will work, assuming that I haven't made any mistakes since moving things from the breadboard :O Once I put the finishing touches on it, I'll send it out to have a prototype made and then we'll see how close to functional the design is.

Once it's done, I'll post some more details as well as a more in depth discussion of how the system is intended to work.

December 1, 2006

The past week or so at the shop has been busy and productive. My father and I were hard at work running new electrical circuits, including installing the new rotary phase converter which will be used to power the 3-phase motors on the English composition casters.

Sunday we had a visit from Stuart Bradley at the Railway Station Press, a fellow student from Monotype University 6. We caught up a bit and Stuart received the full tour before continuing on to Virginia.

June 11, 2006

My father and I moved the two English composition casters into the new shop area. Still remaining is the American caster, which is in a disconnected area of the building. We have to figure out how to "drag" it around to the front so we can move it in.

May 28, 2006

This past weekend, I accompanied Ian Schaefer to Charlotte, NC to pick up an English Composition Caster from Heritage Printers. While I was there, we loaded up an American Thompson type caster, some spare parts and mats for me as well. I've updated the Matrix Inventory and it's reasonably complete. There are a number of oddball matcases that came along with the equipment from Richmond, so I'll be trying to get that sorted out over the course of time as well.

January 25, 2006

I've posted an update on our attempts to get the American caster fired up.

November 26, 2005

As promised, I've started working on a page describing how to move a monotype.

November 21, 2005

A little spray of magic rust penetrator did wonders to loosen the new caster up. It looks like it will be a good machine; it appears to be rebuilt, because it has an "R" ahead of its serial number. It's a 15x17 caster, and the manufacturer's plate also says "division of Lanston Industries", which would indicate it was overhauled relatively late in the game (probably after 1954).

It has the display attachment, but not the low speed gearbox, so I'm somewhat limited in the kinds of display type I can cast. Because of this, I'm still keeping my eye out for a full fledged display caster of some sort.

I also took an inventory of all the wedges, stopbards, keybars and moulds. Next weekend I'll probably dig into the mats to see what I ended up with, as most of the matcases weren't marked in any detectable way.

It's looking like this caster will be the first to be set back up, as it's got a single phase motor and a gas pot fitted for propane. We'll take the gas tank from the gas grill and run an extension cord to the motor (it's already fitted with a plug, how nice!). My father even joked about wheeling the whole thing outside on nice spring days.

November 14, 2005

Well, it's the day after the big move (it was actually two days, but we got so little sleep, it all sort of ran together). Everything made the trip safely, except for some spilled composition mats. I'm working on a blow-by-blow for the next ATF newsletter; I'll post more details of how we actually did the move once I've caught up on sleep. In the meantime, some photosfor the unloading are available.

November 8, 2005

This weekend we're moving some more Monotype equipment. This time, it's a US 15x15 Composition caster with the Display attachment and a Keyboard (something I've desperately needed). The equipment comes to us by way of Dave Klinger in Richmond, VA. With a little luck, by Sunday it should be resting safely in the Barn.

I should have pictures up after I get home from the move.

July 13, 2005

I finally had a chance to contact Duncan Avery about the origins of my casters. The next morning, the answers were waiting in my inbox. Duncan wrote:

Caster 22441 was first supplied to A.Thom, Dublin 13 July 1948. It was then return to Monotype for allowance in 1968 and went into the Printing Dept at Salfords. Certainly I was much involved in the mid 1980s when Harold Berliner bought a great deal of matrices at that time when the Printing Dept was closed and I guess he purchased the Caster then. The machine was originally supplied fitted with Display and leading attachments which presumably are still on.

Caster 28276 first went to Advertizing Agency Services Co, New York in November 1964. They sold it to Daguerreian Era of Pawlet, Vermont in 1975 but I have no further information on it.

Well, that's certainly exciting news; I'm anxious to find out if all of the display attachment is still present. I had noticed that the set width scale was present on the earlier caster. I'll have to dig out my parts book to see what else is involved to see what I've got, and what's missing. It would certainly be easier than finding a separate sorts caster.

June 25, 2005

I started working on the software to drive the composition caster. Initally, it will consist of a "keyboard substitute" to generate an input file for the caster driver. The plan will be to get the simple keyboard application finished in the next two weeks. I'm less concerned about my hardware configuration, as Rich Hopkins is employing the same type of Clippard air valves on his "Mac Mono" system. I guess I got lucky!

June 15, 2005

I've recovered (mostly) from my experience at Monotype University 6 and have started writing down my account at monotype university 6

April 11, 2005

After a few go-arounds with Yellow Transportation, my casters were delivered this morning. Initial reports are that there was no obvious external damage to the crating. I'll have more time to look at them later this week. As a side note, I'm once again reminded that any given experience with a huge company like Yellow is entirely dependent on the competence of the person you manage to get on the phone. Luckily, I got someone good on the line at the last minute to save the day. Your mileage may vary. :)

April 2, 2005

My two monotype casters have started their journey east. They were loaded onto a Yellow Transportation truck in Grass Valley, California yesterday. They should arrive in about a week. Then we get to begin the fun of making room and moving them into their new home.

March 26, 2005

I received the IO Warrior starer kit from Code Mercenaries this past week, along with some other assorted parts that I'll be using to construct the air valve interface. Last night I spent some time soldering the IO Warrior components together. It's been a few years since I've done any sort of electronics soldering, so it took me a few connections before things were moving smoothly. After I finished putting the thing together, I plugged it in to my Powerbook, and (much to my amazement,) it was immediately detected. I started the included Prober application and within a few moments, I was controlling LEDs and reading input at will. So far, so good.

The air valves that I'm going to try are Clippard Minimatic 3 way air valves. They're relatively inexpensive (less than $25 each new) and come up often enough on eBay that I was able to get 35 of them with manifolds for under $70 after a week or two of scouting things out. They are quite small and draw less than a watt, meaning I don't need to employ any expensive relays or driver circuitry.

The IO Warrior's IO lines are TTL, which means that they're not capable of driving a load on their own. That means we have to come up with a way to turn on power to the valves based on the logic level (on or off) of the IO pins. Luckily, we don't have to supply much current to the valves (around 50 milliamps at 12 volts), so there's a readily available IC that we can use just for this purpose. We'll be using the 2803A IC, which is available from multiple sources. The 2803A is a 8 element Darlington Transistor Array that has built in clamping diodes for use with inductive loads such as solenoids. We can connect the 2803A to our 12V power supply, and connect the IO to the base of one of the Transistors. The power leads to each valve gets connected to the emitter and the common power connection. With any luck, when we apply a voltage to the base, in the form of a "1" on the output pin of the IO Warrior, current should flow to the solenoid and the valve should turn on. Not wanting to blow the multiple components up at a time, I tested each component separately, then once the theory seemed sound, I hooked everything up. The moment of truth had arrived. I connected the IO Warrior back up to the Powerbook, turned the 12V power supply on, and started up the Prober program. I sent an output "1" to the pin I had wired up and miraculously, the valve went "click"! A little bit of testing to make sure the valve could be controlled repeatedly leads me to believe this approach will work just fine. My only concern now is whether the Minimatic valves have a high enough flow to be usable. I guess we'll only know by trying, eh?

Now that the mechanical questions have been ironed out, I can start working on the interface program to convert input text to punch codes, and then from punch codes to valve commands. I'm writing a binding between the IOWarrior library and the Pike programming language. This will allow me to create a cross platform (Mac, Linux, Windows) interface and application. Using a high level language also allows me to worry about the design problems at hand, rather than waste time dealing with memory and i/o.

Once the casters arrive and are up and running, I can test to see if the air flow is sufficient, and then work on a more permanent set up (proper circuit boards and enclosures and such). Stay tuned!

March 15, 2005

While I'm waiting for my Composition Casters to be crated and shipped from California, I've busied myself with all of the preparation work required to get them casting type. I'll need to install a new power service, as well as plumbing for water and an air compressor to supply compressed air to drive the caster.

More importantly, and perhaps more problematic, is the lack of a keyboard to punch the paper tape that drives the casters. The 16x17 keyboards needed to take full advantage of the casters I've got are more scarce than the more common 15x15 or 15x17 keyboards commonly used in the US. Additionally, I'd also need keybanks, keybars and stopbars for each matrix case arrangement (MCA) I'd want to use, not to mention a source for the paper tape. All in all, it could be a significant pain and drain on my time and money to go this route. I figured that there has to be a better way. After a little thought, determined that there were basically 2 paths: come up with my own way to punch tape, or figure out how to drive the caster without punched tape.

The effort required to fabricate an alternate tape punch seemed to be a fool's errand, and I'd still need tape. plan is to initially bypass the keyboard situation altogether by hooking the comp caster up to a computer. Now, I'm not the first person to have come up with this plan, In fact, Monotype had computerized tape punching systems (part of the reason there weren't any workable keyboards available). The problem is that all of the solutions were relatively hardware specific, and rather fussy to get and keep running. I figured there had to be a reasonably low cost way to do this.

The caster is driven by paper tape which acts as a 31 position valve bank, causing air to flow through pipes that push up pins on the caster when there are holes in the tape. The typical way to replace paper is to use a bank of solenoid valves to drive the positioning pins. The way that the various techniques diverge is the way in which these valves are connected to the caster, as well as the mechanism for driving the valves. The solution I am going to explore involves the use of a device called an "IOWarrior", which is made by a German company. The IOWarrior in it's simplest form is a 32 line 125 Hz digital I/O module with a USB interface. Its advantage is that it supports multiple computing platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) and that it's relatively inexpensive: $75 for a development board. Most other comparable solutions are several times more expensive, and don't support all 3 platforms that the IOWarrior does. I'm planning on coupling the IOWarrior to the valve bank using Darlington transistor arrays. I've got a set of Clippard Minimatic solenoid valves that I hope will do the trick (I'm not sure if they have a high enough flow rate yet). I can get everything set up and tested before the casters get here, so I'm not wasting time with it later.

Another successful move

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 08:36:30 -0500

After a completely exhausting weekend, I'm pleased to say the the Monotype move was a complete success. Aside from the fact that Saturday ended up being a 21 hour day, we were able to load, move and unload everything without any problems. The only snag was a spilled mat case. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of us loading up (I was too busy working,) but you can check out the photos of the http://hww3.smugmug.com/gallery/963021. I should have a more detailed description prepared later.

More Monotype Adventures

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 08:39:05 -0500

This weekend, we're picking up some more Monotype equipment. This time, it's an American Composition caster with Display, a Keyboard and a bunch of smaller items. With any luck, photos of the move will be available Monday. Stay tuned!

Whew, what a week!

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

It's been a busy week, I save 2 pieces of equipment from the scrapper. First up was a Chandler and Price Craftsmen paper cutter down in Baltimore. That got completely broken up and hauled away in a van, which worked out nicely as it started to rain on the trip home. It's in pretty good condition, except for a few minor fix up points, and should work out pretty well.

The second piece of equipment was a Chandler and Price 12x18 New Series press. The story of this press is rather interesting (and incomplete). I received it from the http://www.pennsvalleymuseum.org in exchange for a small donation. What is interesting is that it was in what appears to be its original shipping crate. Whether it was ever actually used is undetermined at this point, but it certainly doesn't wear in any of the usual spots. There's some writing on the crate that I've not yet decoded. Read more about this at crated press.

You can cast type

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I just returned from a week in West Virginia, attending Monotype University 6. You can read all about the experience in monotype university 6.

Arrival of the machines

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I've received some photos of the machines as they were delivered earlier this week. Hopefulyl the inside of the crates will be in good condition too!