fiber reinforced wheel (known as the star wheel) and into the ‘assembling elevator’ which serves the same purpose as the hand compositor's stick. When the space band key near the keyboard is pressed, one of the space bands drops out of the box and almost directly into the assembling elevator. The assembling elevator (or more commonly just the ‘assembler’) is adjustable for different lengths of line (in picas). Once the line approaches its correct length, the operator is made aware of this by a bell or other indicator. If the line is ‘loose’ or too short, there is too much ‘white space’ for the space band wedges to fill out the line, and the matrices could possibly turn sidewise or fail to seal against each other as the machine prepares for the casting operation. If the line is ‘tight’ or too long, the elevator carrying the matrices and space bands will not seat properly in front of the mold slot. Both the Linotype and Intertype machines have two important safeties that act during the casting operation – the ‘pump stop’, which comes into play on loose lines, and the ‘vise automatic', which comes into play on tight lines. Both scenarios, if not stopped by these safety features, usually result in a “squirt” of molten type metal, encasing the matrices and the elevator in metal in the process. Not only is it time-consuming to clean up after a squirt, a tight line usually has not come down far enough to mate with the slots on the mold face, resulting in damage to the matrices. Therefore, it is considered very poor form for an operator (or the machinist who cared for the machine) to permit this to happen. When the line is assembled to the correct length, the operator presses down on a lever which raises the assembling elevator up into the delivery channel and starts the automatic casting cycle. The delivery channel transfers the matrices out of the assembler and into the first elevator. The first elevator then descends to a position in front of the mold, and if the elevator has not descended fully by the time the machine starts the process of aligning the matrices (most often caused by a ‘tight’ line), the first of the two safeties, the vise automatic, brings the machine to a full stop before the supporting lugs on the matrices are crushed by the