Thanks for posting those piccies. Great stuff! They all seem to be Monotype or Linotype though.
I knew that Linotype & Machinery Ltd had taken over the UK Intertype hot metal business after Harris Intertype gave up on it and had shut the Slough factory down - so the last 2 Linotypes to be built new in the UK were actually existing machines reconditioned to factory specification using new parts by Mike Kirby of Linecasting Machinery Ltd (now at Whitstable, Kent, UK, but not sure if he was already located there then) in 1985 under contract to L&M, while the last two UK Intertypes were built the same way by him for, and using parts supplied by, the Linotype factory at Altrincham in 1986. I understand that Mike is the last full-time professional linecaster engineer in the UK who can still recondition machines to factory spec, though he is a general printing machinery engineer nowadays, as he'd starve if he was only doing linecasters. I understand that Brian Russell of the British Printing Society's Shropshire branch is a retired linecaster engineer too, and that a retired former Intertype assembly specialist from the Slough factory gave a lot of help to a BPS member in the Berkshire area in sorting out poblems with his Intertype a year or so ago. How many people do we still have in the UK with amateur and professional linecaster engineering skills, and where are they?
Lovely pictures, but no picture of the Thompson caster? Of course, the business was taken over by Lanston Monotype, but I understand that they kept producing them until the very end.
Monotypes and Thompsons aren't linecasters, but they are certainly hot metal machines - wasn't this site called the hot metal site in its previous incarnation? - and they certainly produce metal type. Do we have enough Forum members interested in them, to have a chatroom for afficionados of casting machines that produce individual types?
Re that strange Intertype Model A that Dan mentioned, the point about the Intertype that made them superior in their own way to the Linotype was that the A, B and C were the same machine, the letter indicating whether they had 1, 2 or 3 magazines, and Intertype made a big thing out of the modular standardisation of their machines, claiming that any part would fit any standardised Intertype machine that had ever been produced, even though old and new parts might look quite different.
Apart from the difference between mould depths between US and UK machines that seems to have originated in machinery being available in the UK when production started in the original Manchester factory that would allow a lower shoulder to be used, with less risk of ink inadvertently transferring to the job off the shoulder as well as the face of the slug, the Intertype was standardised on both sides of the big ditch too, whereas UK and US model ranges had significant variations between models even before the UK went entirely its own way with the Model 48, roughly 70 years ago.
As a result, Intertype instruction books, whether the single volume or the 4-part version, and the parts manuals (unless they are very early ones that only cover the A, B and/or C) are universally applicable regardless of the model or country of origin, and they are still readily available in the UK, whereas instruction books and parts books for UK Linotypes are far more specific to particular models and their variants, you can't rely on a part from one model being interchangeable with the same part from another model, and US documentation is generally not relevant to UK models.
Maybe that modular standardisation explains the Harris Intertype Model C that I found last month, with a very late serial number, fitted with the "New Streamlined Intertype" square base and the "New Streamlined Intertype" Model C3 arrangement of front-loading magazines. Maybe an old C that had been factory-reconditioned to as-new specification, using standard C3 parts where Model C parts were no longer available from stock? Would that make sense?
Which makes me wonder if that strange Model A that Dan menions was either a very early production line example, or possibly even one of the very few handcrafted prototype machines that were manufactured to break ino the market, before the poduction line was set up to manufacture the Model A in quantity. As I recall, the A was the only model available to start with, and was then made available as the B (with 2 magazines) or as the C (with 3), as the demand built up.
Tony
