Tag Archives: Cal Poly

Gliding into a saw restoration

This is Part 2 of my story about restoring an antique Hammond Glider “TrimOsaw” for the Shakespeare Press Museum at Cal Poly. To read the first part, click here. I got to the point of removing the aluminum nameplate from … Continue reading

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Restoring that ol’ saw – a Hammond Glider

Now that the Smyth machine is working, I decided to take on a new project. Last fall I offered to restore a 1960s era Hammond Glider TrimOsaw for the Shakespeare Press Museum at Cal Poly. This machine is best described … Continue reading

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Designing a monogram font

Years ago I made a reproduction-quality proof of a type font in the Shakespeare Press Museum at Cal Poly. This font is comprised a sets of three letters that can be assembled into monograms. Monograms were quite popular for business … Continue reading

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Lining Livermore, der zweite Teil

This is a continuation of a blog I wrote two days ago. To read the first part, click here. After I put all the letters (called “glyphs” In typography) into a master Adobe Illustrator document, I built the destination environment for the … Continue reading

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AppleScript solves my grid mask challenge in Adobe Photoshop

I pride myself on being a competent user of Adobe Photoshop. I know how to make my photos look good by sliding sliders and pushing buttons and applying filters and adding Layer Effects and all sorts of visual things. Occasionally I need … Continue reading

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Electronic motor control
and my obsession with a 1935 bookbinding machine

This is the second part of my obsession story. To read the first part, please click here. And that’s where my odyssey began. Alternating current induction motors use the frequency of the line power (60 Hz in our case) to … Continue reading

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Obsessing on a 1935 bookbinding machine

I get obsessed about my projects. My current obsession is the restoration of a 1935 Smyth book sewing machine in the Shakespeare Press Museum at Cal Poly (I was the faculty advisor before I retired). That machine sews the spines … Continue reading

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Reminiscences of a prepress guy

I am an old prepress guy. I owned one of the first PostScript service bureaus in the U.S. I was there at the beginning. It was painful, but overall it was a great business. We had been traditional typographers, and … Continue reading

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Cal Poly’s TAGA students win the Kipphan Cup at TAGA 2019

The Cal Poly TAGA team has won the prestigious Helmut Kipphan Cup at this year’s conference of the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts. The Kipphan Cup is awarded to the university team whose technical journal is judged to be … Continue reading

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The Bishop Peak Portrait Project – complete!

Thank you all for your patience while I built the Bishop Peak Portrait Project, a series of thousands of photos of San Luis Obispo’s most prominent mountain. I started the project in November, 2015 with the construction of a weatherproof … Continue reading

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