Hamond EasyKast, terminology question.
Hello all, my name’s Drew Black.
I’m new here, and am actually new to the letterpress printing world. Having volunteered at a couple living history museums in on the West side of Washington State, I needed to find a volunteer museum position when I transferred to WSU on the East side of the state. I found a good fit at the Roy Chatters Newspaper & Printing Museum in Palouse, WA.
In the few months I’ve been volunteering at the museum, I’ve already begun creating new interpretive signs for the various presses and other machines, while also learning how to operate a few of the machines (I can only go half-speed, but last week I printed on one of the Chandler & Price platen presses!)
In the quest for information for the new interpretive signs, I’ve found myself rather confused with the terminology for the museum’s Hamond EasyKast machine. I know that the machine dropped liquid lead into a paper mold (known as a “mat”) to form a lead graphic image.
My questions are:
1). What was that flat lead graphic image called?
2). What was this whole process called? Was it just called “casting”?
I know that making a mat from an entire newspaper page so a lead cylinder could be made for a rotary press was called “stereotyping”. Was the Hamond EasyKast process also called “stereotyping”, even when it involved making “clip art”, rather than whole text?
Thanks.
—Drew Black
Drew:
Yes, The process is stereotype casting, and the plate would have been called a stereotype plate.
When I was a kid, my best friend’s father ran a movie theater, and he would give me the excess mats to mess around with. I would take mats down to the local newspaper, and the guys in the casting room would make flat cast stereotypes for me of portions of the ads I wanted to print. IOften they woudl cast the plate and I would ask them to cut down the plate into words. I would mount the plates on wood and print cards from them for my friends.
There are some fo those images I would like to have now, advertising movies from the sixties, but I always returned th emetal to the newspaper when I asked them to cast something else for me.
I think they rather enjoyed helping out a jr. high kid who had an interest in printing. I’m certain their friendliness helped me decide on a career in journalism and printing. I only hope I have done the same for someone else.
John Henry
Thanks Mr. Henry. I wanted to make sure I had the proper terminology before printing the sign. I don’t know if this forum allows posting of photos, but if it does, I’ll try to get some photos of the museum posted for everyone to see.
Have a good day, and thanks again. :)
—Drew Black
The Hammond EasyKaster manual is online at:
http://www.circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/stereotyping/hammon...
(Unfortunately, it has no illustrations.)
There are several books online which cover the process. One which is devoted to it is Partridge’s “Stereotyping” (1909):
https://archive.org/details/stereotypingprac00partrich
Also, on the Google Books Advanced Search page:
http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search
search for the title “Electrotyping and Stereotyping” with the author “Hatch”. This gives the 1918 volume by Hatch and Stewart written for the Typothetae on these subjects. This has good line art which might be useful for placards. (I’ve got a 600dpi greyscale scan of an original copy, if you need better resolution than Google supplies.)
(The EasyKaster was introduced in the 1920s. Some of the details in these books differ a bit from later practice.)
The Hammond EasyKaster also had a secondary role as a pig caster. You could ignore the casting box and put a separate table over it to turn the EasyKaster into a sort of platform with a melting pot and nozzle. You then put molds for the pigs used to feed Linotypes and other linecasting/typecasting machines on this table and filled them from the melting pot.
Regards,
David M.
www.CircuitousRoot.com
Drew is apparently asking about “dropping lead onto a paper mould”??? With respect to esteemed contributors is this not, casting, wrap around stereos, from FLONGS??? Of course there maybe different terminology in the U.S.A. But Isaac Newton is kicking three bells out of his last known abode, to get the well intentioned postees to finish the course, cross the “T”s dot the “I”s and just mention that molten metal can not “FLOW” around, cylindrical objects like paper moulds!!! INJECTION MOULDED via FLONGS YES!!!>>>>>>>>>>>Must Try Harder to help the new ones with the complete picture.!!! And in the process if I, can fairly diplomatically/politely be taught and learn, and as a consequence, others can pick up the info for the future, GOOD NEWS