Replacement metal for lead
Is there a metal that can be used to cast letters in something else then lead? I’d like to gift my Grammer Multigraph to my niece who has kids that still put stuff in their mouth. It would be great to save off the old type for when everyone is older, but I would like to cast new letters with this replacement metal. Would it be aluminum? Is there a place that can do this? I have a 3-D printer (yes I’m in to printing for some reason) and could make molds.
The risk of swallowing or choking is at least equal to the risk of lead exposure, so casting new type is only a partial remedy. Why not gift it all and advise your niece of the safety concerns?
You could experiment with using just tin, which has a lower melting point than type metal and should be safe, as food containers have been coated inside with tin to limit potential corrosion of the steel. Perhaps alloying it with a little antimony would help reducing shrinkage of the metal as it cools. Type metal is a mix of lead, tin, and antimony, mostly lead, and it is the lead that is most toxic and the largest proportion. Tin type will cost more to make but in the small quantities you contemplate the difference ought to be minimal.
I don’t know you’d get the quality out of some other casting. I once used a rubberised two-part resin to cast a mold, then used a hard plastic two part resin to cast the letter from the mold, but life’s too short. Just put that type on a high shelf.
Of course, on a high shelf it’ll be a nightmare if it lands on you, but hey, YOLO.
I believe Kinsley used a zinc alloy with their hot stamping machines.
While not totally a solution to your query, I have a Ludlow slug which was cast in a plastic injection molder. Someone was testing the possibility of switching away from typemetal to a plastic material. The slug was given to me by Ward Schori many years ago. The Ludlow mats were used by locking into some sort of adjustable mold.
In reality, the most likely scenario is either leave well enough alone (my two children grew to adulthood in a home with several tons of typemetal, but not in their playroom), or having your niece utilize plastic-backed photopolymer plates for type and images.
John G. Henry
Cedar Creek Press
The last time Dave Seat came here, he said part of his work was converting line-casters away from lead and asbestos.
Elemental lead isn’t absorbed, but lead oxide is. We all acquire old type-metal, and the danger is that type blight.
To 3-D print individual types for a Multigraph seems fantastic. There is so much 3-D information in the design > master > matrix process. Transition from face to beard to shoulder and printibility were well-known from experience at places like ATF, Mergenthaler, Monotype, and even Multigraph.
Few of us get to the asbestos stage, but its worse than lead by far.
kareardo, you still have the problem of children putting things in their mouth. Bad idea to give kids this machine, fingers pinched,etc. So Aluminum is also a bad idea. A type writer probably a better plan.best james