Sanding the face of hammered wood type

No, but it sounds like it could work provided you sand them very flat, and very level. Regardless of how it minutely affects the faces, it can’t end up worse than their current poorly printing condition, right?

If you’re inexperienced with sanding surfaces uniformly, I recommend getting a large sheet of sandpaper (4-5 times wider than the type to be planed) and mounting it to a sheet of plexiglass or somesuch flat, stiff object.

Work the type in a sort of figure eight pattern, rotating it 90 degrees every three passes. This will help keep the sanding pattern even and level.
You might start with 220 and then bump up to 400 and then 600 grits.

Worth a try…Wet with water a Q, X, or Z or some totally wasted letter to try.Torch a corner to see if you can swell the wood. This works with pine or other soft woods, don’t know about wood type!
If you want to print with it (as it is now) slip a wet sheet of blotter paper covered front and back with some plastic sheets. put it under your tympan. Then add a sheet or two of index under the type to get some ink coverage on those corners!

Platen Printer, as Haven Press suggests the above *modus operandi* spot on!! perhaps I can just add a little back up and slight refinements, here in U.K. one or two, are experimenting with reproducing poster type, which involves sourcing “end grain* hardwood, i.e. Box, Beech, Yew and seemingly, the best (for results) Hornbeam, and others, all used for poster type, but all with varying degrees of growth rings/markings.
With the use of a precision Printers Power saw, taking the pieces down to type high is/was no problem, but then bringing the face back to best possible surface, for reproduction, gets tricky, initial efforts involved blocking the face down, (before attempting to cut the image) with coarse(r) wet and dry, exactly as Haven suggests, the principle was fine, but starting with a coarse grade, actually introduced more scratches than it removed, the action of changing direction, in whatever motion, seemed to follow the grain/growth ring lines more than taken them down uniformly, after a lot of *genteel* loud words, Plan *B* evolved, STARTING! with, wet and dry, 600 grit, side by side with 1,000 grit from a multi pack, stuck down with D.S.A. (and admittedly with much more *genteel* persuasion, like what bullocks are short of)??? and eventually, with the use of *metal polish* on the 1,000 grade, ended up with fairly passible/usable and flat surface, with one variation to Havens, figure of 8, eventually plumped for a blocking action that, involved fairly gentle, straight, backward and forward motion, between thumb and finger of one hand and with gentle finger tip, of the other hand, against the centre/back of the piece being flatted.!!!
Granted and appreciated, not exactly retrieving a damaged contoured surface, but possibly of use, to arrive at the correct end results.
One more gimmick/trick from way back, it was fairly common practice to take a piece of poster type, with a fairly big surface area, to view, turn it upside down and re-cut the base, by hand, to produce for example, a pointing arrow, or an exclamation mark, or any simple configuration, that the average compositor could manage, printed as needed and reverted to the right way up, for future use??
This seemingly silly principle, offered as a means to an end for perfecting refurbishment, of any battered/worn poster type, by using the foot rather than the face, initially for experiments, sacrificial, but perfectly re-trievable.!!!
Good Luck.

No matter how carefully you try to sand the face of a piece of type by hand, you will continue to round the type. The wood for the type was originally sanded in half-rounds prior to being cut into letters, then the bottom was planed flat to make it type high. The sanding would have been done with a drum sander or a door sander, but because of the nature of sand-paper the edges tend to catch first, similar to how a planer bites into wood when it is fed into it. Do not dampen the wood type if you value it, it can warp and crack while drying. A proper make-ready might be able to make up for some of the inconsistancy in the type face, but sanding the face will probably give you another bunch of problems.

Paul

I thought Mick’s description above was very interesting and I’m sure it will be useful to some on this site.

However, in this particular situation, I agree with Paul. I think it is extremely unlikely that you (or anyone) are going to be able to sand type evenly, especially since it is so small (6 line). Think of a cap “I” for instance…..you would have to keep it exactly at right angles to the sandpaper, or you would round off the long edges of the “I” even more. If you inadvertently put more pressure on one end of the “I” than the other, you would make, for example, the top of the “I” lower in height than the bottom.

I thought about locking up all (or a large part) of the font in a chase on your imposing stone, and then putting a piece of sandpaper on the stone, and putting the chase upside down on the sandpaper, and pushing it in various directions on the sandpaper. Then at least all the type would be at right angles to the sandpaper. However, there is a good chance that the type will bow in the chase, and if that happened, various letters would become uneven in height as they were sanded.

I think the best idea is to leave the type alone and print with it as per Stanislaus’s second paragraph above.

Many years ago I raided a former poster-printing plant. I had not been the first there and the owner was a little cranky by the time I had arrived. He was very tired of dickering with people and simply told me that any font of wood type would be $60. I did find a font 72 line Clarendon (that’s right - a foot tall) that I packed into several apple boxes. I even talked him out of the rack it had been in (stacked like books on a shelf). Anyway, I was very happy with everything that I took away.

In giving his initial instructions, he also mentioned that there were three cabinets that absolutely nothing could be taken from. He said they still used that type to imprint circus and rodeo posters. After I had collected everything that I wanted, curiosity got the best of me and I just HAD to see what was in the ‘sacred’ cabinets. Oh my God! It was absolutely the worst crap you could imagine!!!!! All ugly gothic sans serif wood type that looked like it had all been beaten with chains and a ballpeen hammer!!!! I wouldn’t have taken any of it home if it had been FREE!!!!! This was the type they used everyday and it certainly showed!!!!! It was truly beaten to death!

Another thing I should mention is that every wood font in the place was stained red. They even left the red ink on overnight on the big flatbed press they were using for imprinting.

The best thing I got out of the place was a huge Hamilton wood type cabinet, made specifically to hold wood type fonts in oversized cases. It was covered in paint and pidgeon poop so I got it for next to nothing. I stripped and refinished it and it is one of my favorite pieces in the shop.

Rick

Love this story, Rick!

When I ran Hatch Show Print we were faced with printing from type that had never been cleaned properly. All of the counters were filled with dried type, and chunks of hard skin from the ink cans had been pounded into the printing surface of the type. We scraped off the dried ink, and used a type-wash (instead of Gasoline) to clean the type. When the dried ink was removed the type looked looked like the craters of the moon, but when we printed carefully with make-ready and with plenty of ink the type printed fairly well. Since my time there Hatch has managed to make printing with beaten type their trademark, and it seems like shitty printing that looks like make-ready is all the rage.

Paul

People outside of the educated/learned letterpress printing community sure love the look of it though.

http://www.theawl.com/2012/08/grunge-typography