While doing some research on the Westinghouse frames, I attempted to find the Font used on the LMR Bakelite Pull Plates, I found a few fonts that are similar (Uno Stencil BS3696 matches some of the numbers & letters but not all) but nothing that exactly matches the Bakelite plates, does anyone know what if Font was? and if it's available anywhere?
Thanks in Advance!
I think you mean
BS3893, which is the
BSI standard for scales and lettering on meters and gauges (and also apparently the standard for the numerals on older BR speed limit signs). BS3696 is the
BSI standard for master gears.
I found these pictures of BR(LMR) lever 'lollipop' plates for sale:
These are made of
Traffolyte, a material made by Metro-Vickers in Trafford Park (hence the name) consisting of two layers of phenolic plastic that was designed to have the upper layer engraved through to reveal the contrasting lower layer.
The fact that the labels were engraved is important, as there was basically only one wy of doing that in the pre-CNC routing days, which was to use a pantograph engraver that had a stylus guided by a 'copy plate' containng the typeface to reproduce the characters at the engraving head. The market leader for these types of machines was Taylor-Hobson, who had their own standard typeface (though copy plates could be made to any typeface as a special order).
The T-H pantograph typeface is similar to the BS3693 one, but some of the numerals (in partcular the tails of the 6 and 9, which curl over further) differ from the BSI typeface (as seen on the lever plates above). The same T-H pantograph machines were used to engrave the labels on aircraft switch panels and the front panels of military radios and test equipment, and the same typeface as the lever plates above can be seen on those.
DIN ISO typefaces have largly taken over for engraved panels these days, but a few years ago a designer at a UK font foundry drew up digital recreations of the T-H typeface variants as the 'Pantograph' font family, which can be found
here, but it's not free (it costs £240 for each style, or £750 for the complete pack). Someone appears to have pirated it and uploaded it to a free font site, but it's probably not a good idea for me to post a link here. If you search for 'Pantograph font' is will probably turn up as one of the links.
