German Type Casting Tool

[Dave Hughes]

Interesting post on Flickr. It looks like it's in superb condition for it's age.

Here's what the poster said about it:

PRIMITIVE GERMAN TYPECASTING TOOL WITH HANDWRITTEN MANUAL

I got this single letter typecasting tool from a family in St. Gallen. They've had it from their family letterpress printshop which closed down somewhen in the late 80ies.

It is a tool with which you could copy some single large bodied leadtype sorts. In the handwritten manual it says: You would cast a lead-matrix (YES! LEAD-MATRIX...) from a piece of type. It says: Blacken the letter first with an oil lamp, then cast a matrix – the lead shouldn't be to hot. Then you use a oil-lamp to blacken your fresh cast matrix again and off you go casting a letter...

It says further that they bought this tool somewhen in the 1920ies from Berlin! It is still in its original box! It also says that it works pretty well, if you get trained a bit... haha

I didnt try it out yet! But I am really happy that this old men wrote a short manual before he packed it up to archive it in the late 1980ies!

IMG_2255 by Dafi Kühne, on Flickr

[jim crichton]

Further to yesterday's post regarding PRIMITIVE GERMAN TYPECASTING TOOL.  This machine is called a Typofix Typecaster and the manual shows Alfred Kopinski, Representant, Mulhouse-Haut-Rhin as the agent.

Two or three years ago I posted ten photos of the machine and two photos of the manual. 

These photographs do not show on your photograph section.

Jim C.

[Dave Hughes]

Not quite sure what happened to the pictures Jim.

We've got a PDF of the manual in the Library.