Ideal Stencil Machine Co Stencil Cutter
While volunteering at the Western Pacific Railroad Museum, I get to use quite a bit of old equipment in our day-to-day operations. One piece that I particularly like is this stencil cutter, for cutting letter stencils to be painted onto equipment.
One mistake that I made in the video is that I forgot that I had added the apostrophe to Dont, which is why I thought panic was a longer word than dont. I did remake the stencil right after the video, so don’t panic:
This stencil will inevitably come in handy.
Easily the most appealing part of this machine is the satisfying dial indicator on the front. It had never quite worked right, so I got the bright idea to try and fix it this weekend, since I am a certified mechanical engineer now.
The results were… regrettable. These gears were cast out of such low-grade iron that as soon as I touched the set-screw with a screw driver, the entire base of the gear disintegrated.
Using a respectable quantity of metal gel adhesive and a lost glove to hold it in place, I glued it back in place. Not particularly the method I wanted to use, but in the end the machine did end up working again, so maybe I’m forgiven?
They just don’t make equipment this satisfying anymore. Mechanical engineering is a field that really feels like its esthetic peak has come and gone; everything we do now is just optimization for cost or performance. Must be why I find EE so distracting…
The museum also has a second cutter for a larger font. Operation is a little simpler in that it’s simply a flat table with grooves at each row and column of the monospaced font. Not nearly as satisfying as the geared advancement mechanism of the smaller one.
Update: Thanks to the generosity of my readers, I now have a pile of Ideal manuals which you might find handy. I was also asked to cut a sample of the Ideal No 1 font.