[TheForge] [OT] Re: Cats, boots (Was: chickens)

[Andrew Vida]

I have a few sets of quoins somewhere, and a quoin key, composing 
sticks, galleys... all stuff I rescued from the NYC Bd. of Ed.  In the 
80s when I was teaching, those idiots, and I am being both kind to them 
here as well as very unkind to the idiots of the world, were most 
feverishly dismantling their shops, throwing everything out.  It was a 
waste of such obscene proportions that words fail me.  It was either GE 
or Westinghouse had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars of old 
press equipment - pilot presses, a large sheet-fed press, several AB 
Dick 360 2 cylinder offset presses, imposing stones, type, chases, inks, 
horizontal process cameras, films, plate burners, and everything else 
you could imagine to run your own printing business.  The bastard for 
whom I worked, Harvey Kay (may he rot in hell), threw it all away, never 
having set any of it up, which a colleague and I were going to do.  He 
almost lost his job over it, but in the end he skated, proceeded to CCNY 
where he dismantled and shut down the Industrial Arts department, and 
then slithered his way to Columbia University, where I think he may 
still be residing in one of the sewer lines with the rest of his commie 
friends.  Yes, it's still a sore subject with me, 27 years later.

Mike Spencer wrote:
> Bruce wrote:
> 
>> For "wedge" read "screw" and all your objections disappear. 
> 
> I know this isn't what you're referring to but it's related:
> 
> I was fortunate to be able to take "print shop" in 9th grade.  I
> printed up forms for a bogus laboratory that allowed me to order a lot
> of dangerous and otherwise unobtainable chemicals.  But that's another
> story.
> 
> The print shop had really cool devices called quoins, pairs of iron
> wedges which, when put together on a flat surface, formed a unit with
> parallel sides and a toothed groove down the center.  The teeth formed
> a kind of diagonal rack gear.  A corresponding tip on a T-handled tool
> made a pinion.  When the hand-set type was ready to go, it was placed
> on a stone surface inside a steel frame -- a "chase" -- and the extra
> space mostly filled with blocks of polished hardwood.  But space was
> left for the quoins, which were inserted loosely and in pairs on at
> least one side and one end.
> 
> Then you inserted a wrench -- the pinion-like tool -- into a quoin
> pair and twisted.  That forced the wedge-shaped halves to bypass each
> other and exert enormous force on the block of type.  When this was
> done on both sides or all around, the type was "locked in chase" and
> ready to go to the press.
> 
> Alas, I've never come across any of those quoins to put in my tool box
> but I have come across some places where they'd have been handy,
> places where I wanted to exert considerable force from the inside of
> something outward but had severe space limitations.
> 
> In earlier centuries, printers used wooden wedges tapped into place
> with a hammer.  The iron ones, though, always impressed me as a
> landmark of technological and blacksmitherly cleverness.
> 
> I don't *think* that's way off topic.  Opinions may vary. :-)
> 
> - Mike
>