Rochester T&t Type 232?

I have a stamp that on first blush appears to be a T&T Type 233. However the space between the lines on my stamp is 12 mm, which would make it a Type 232 (not listed for Rochester in the T&T catalog) rather than a Type 233 (11.5 mm line spacing).

In addition, the lines on my stamp appear to be 1 mm thick rather than 1.1 mm thick. But as I am using the mm scale on an Honor-Bilt perf gauge, I question my capability to measure to the 0.1 mm with it.

Any help in figuring out what I have is appreciated.

Interesting questions, I will bring it up with the PSS catalog guys. I am sure they will say the 1 vs 1.1 mm issue is immaterial because of vagaries in the printing process. There is no way to determine, 90 years after the use, if there were two different devices or just over inked printing. The 11.5 mm versus 12 mm issue is trickier. That appears to be the only difference between the catalog listings for PSS type 232 versus 233. Some of my Rochester's look to be 11.5 and some 12. I think everybody would agree that they were probably on the same device so listing one PSS type is proper. I would suggest to the catalog guys that PSS 232 & 233 should be lumped together with spacing 11.5 to 13.5. I do not recall if any city has a 232 and 233 both listed which might require listing 2 different types.

Just looked at 232/233 in my book and I had noted on 1/1/17 the line spacing on 232 was changed to 12 to 15 mm.

Thanks for the responses. I figured it was an issue of minor vagaries in printing. But as I am a n00b I wanted to check with the experts.

I have gotten back information from the PSS catalog editors on this question - basically the answer is the descriptions for PSS232 and PSS233 both might have some vertical spacing differences between different towns and different cities. They are slight, don't fret about them. There seems to be only 1 town in the catalog with both 232's and 233's - so we should be able to figure out that type we have without difficulty.

quoting...

Hi, Charlie,

It turns out that there is only one town that has both a 232 and a 233. That is Stamford, CT.

The 233 from Stamford measures between 11½ and 12 mm line spacing (Like the Rochester) and the 232 measures about 13 mm.

Many of the electros have row by row slight variations in the line spacing dimensions of ¼ mm or less, which is below the threshold of significance.

I do not feel that we can eliminate the 233, which occurs from 6 towns, by expanding the dimensional specification of the 232 to 11½ to 13½ mm. from the current specification of 12 to 13½ mm.

We possibly could change the dimensional criteria for the 232 by increasing the lower dimension to 12½ from 12 mm, but this would require measuring (or at least eyeballing) all of the 105 232s listed in the catalog, a task that I do not wish to take on.

We could change the dimensional criteria of the 233 from 11½ mm to 11½ to 12 mm, but this would make the upper limit of the 233 the same as the lower limit of the 232, unless we increased the lower limit of the 232 at the same time.

At some point, the various state editors established what they would call these types, 232 or 233, and there is no reason to believe that having once made this decision, that it needs to be revisited. I am quite sure that we are not going to find another town which has both 232 and 233 devices, although we might well find one or more towns that has more than one device of whichever type is listed. If we did, the best we could do is to apply footnote (11) as the dimensional difference would not exceed the minimum ½ mm to list both devices.

Basically, I do not feel that this is a significant enough issue to justify the work required to resolve it, but if anyone wishes to check the dimensions on all of the 232s (and the 233s) to see what the range of dimensions actually is, I would then be happy to make the indicated adjustments to the Style Chart descriptions, if appropriate.

Best regards,

Arnold (Selengut) "

If nothing else this response gives example to how seriously the editors work on getting the catalog right and helpful. There is no need to change the 'traditional' listings in this area.

Well it looks like my info about 15 is wrong. Not sure who told me this, but I did note it my book at the time, sorry for the wrong info.

@chasa

Thanks for the info. If I ever get all of the 232s and/or 233s I will have to take Mr. Selengut up on his offer.

dk: make sure you check all 10 lines in each 232 because the lines spacing might very slightly within the device also! jack: there may still be some subtle changes in the 8th edition descriptions - coming soon !