[David Dunlop]

Although these stencil cutting machines are beasts to move, they are surprisingly straight forward to operate. Everything you need is right in front of you, on top of the machine.

When you turn the large Character Wheel, top centre, the red indicator moves to the character you want to select and this places the corresponding character cutting die set at the front of the case, directly below the Operating Lever.

The lower front Table is where you place the sheet of Oil Board. This Table is cast with six stepped ridges, the first at the lowermost edge of the Table and the remaining five continue up the Table under the Cutter Die Set Guard. This arrangement gives you the six rows of text the machine is capable of cutting in a sheet of Oil Board, assuming the piece of Oil Board you are working with is six inches high. You start with the Oil Board at the bottom ridge of the Table, to cut the first, top most, row of the stencil and move up a ridge for each of the remaining five rows.

The lever at the bottom front of the Table raises and lowers the set of rollers that move the Oil Board from right to left across the Table. Lever up, raises the rollers. Lever down, locks the rollers down onto the Oil Board. To the best of my knowledge, there is no ‘Reverse’. The machine will only move the Oil Board from right to left. In addition, the machine will only cut reliably starting at the top row of characters and working down. If you try starting a stencil at a row and then working up, the rollers will eventually arrive on a cut character in the Oil Board, thereby losing contact with the Oil Board and stop moving it.

The ridges on the Table are 0.75 inch high each. This gives a 0.25 inch spacing between each row of characters on the stencil you are cutting and this arrangement is fixed in stone, or in this case cast iron.

You will notice in the attached photograph there are four vertical coloured lines cast into the Table: red, white, red and red. The first three lines are clustered to the left side of the table with a 1.5 inch space between each of them, and the remaining red line is somewhat to the right, three inches away. When you align the left edge of the Oil Board with one of these three lines on the left of the Table at the start of each row of characters you are cutting on the Oil Board, the rows will be left justified, with the first characters of each row directly under each other.

Regardless of the size of the character you are cutting, each character uses a 0.75 inch wide block of space. To get a blank space between words, you only move the Cutting Lever down half way. This covers the easy, single line stencils, or left justified multiline stencils.

Where things get challenging and introduce a dash of basic mathematics to ones though processes, is when you have to deal with multi line centre justified stencils. I was lucky to have photographs, illustrations or actual objects on hand to confirm centre justification existed in the original wartime stencil work on the 52-Set.

I started by printing out each line on a piece of paper, counting the characters in each line (a space is a character) and noting the number at the end of each line. As a simple example, suppose I had a three line stencil and the character count was seven, ten and eight. I would choose the white vertical reference line for the middle, longest row when I got to it.

You will note that the spacing between the set of red, white and red lines to the left of the Table is 1.5 inches. This equals two full character spaces, either side of the white line. If you move the left edge of the Oil board towards the left red line, you are moving the start point of that row of characters to the right on the Oil Board. Conversely, if you move the left edge of the Oil Board towards the right red line, the start of the line of characters moves to the left on the Oil Board.

So the first line of this imaginary stencil is three characters shorter than the middle line (seven versus ten). To centre this first line over the middle line, there must be 1.5 empty spaces either end of this first line. The tricky bit is dealing with the half character at the start of this line. If any character takes up 0.75 inches, then half a character will use up 3/8-inch. So we start the stencil by placing the Oil Board on the lowest ridge of the Table and lining up the left edge of the board 3/8-inch to the left of the white reference line and locking it down. The start point for this line is now one half character to the right. We get the extra full character by only moving the Cutting Lever down half way. You then proceed to cut the seven characters of the first line of the stencil and release the board. Relocate the Oil Board on the next ridge up on the Table and align the left edge with the white reference line and lock it down. Start cutting the 10 characters of this line and release the board. The first line will now be centred over the second line with 1.5 character spaces each end.

Move the Oil Board one more ridge up the Table and align the left edge of it once again to the white reference line. Start this line with a space and then cut the eight characters required and release the board. You should then have a three line, centre justified, stencil.

The manual for the stencil cutter does not go into this sort of detail for some reason, but it is useful to know and worth documenting.

Three more stencils to go. If anything new pops up, I will let you know.



David