A Watched Ludlow Never Melts

I spent some time at the Excelsior Press today with my friend Alan. We changed the wiring on one of his Ludlows and then fired it up. While waiting the 50-some minutes it took for the full lead pot to melt the type metal Alan completed some of the work for local municipalities he's been doing since the 1970's: padding, perfing, numbering, cutting to size and boring holes in multi-part dog and cat licenses.

By the time that work was done the Ludlow was ready to go and we had some fun playing with mats and hot metal. I ended up with about a dozen Front Room Press slugs in 36 point Umbria. This may lead to a new Art-Deco motif for the Press...NOT! But it was a lot of fun and the slugs will be interesting to print.

We're going to cast and print specimen sheets and Alan will be starting a hot metal casting service. He has dozens of mats so has a great selection. Look for this soon at the Excelsior Press website, a link to which is in the left column of this Blog. I also should mention that Alan has some presses (including Kelsey's), type cabinets, furniture, and many other accessories for sale. Even some nice smaller -size planers I made at work; I'm a cabinetmaker in my real life. In particular he has several nice 2/3 size type cabinets available which are great for small spaces. All proceeds go to the Excelsior Press museum. Check out his website to see more.