Typophile

Which 1930's to 1940's fonts on this logo?

Galane

This is a logo plate on a piece of equipment made by Blackhawk. Founded in 1910 as American Grinder and Manufacturing Company, changed its name to Blackhawk in 1925, bought Hydraulic Tool Company in 1927 and soon after began production of hydraulic tools for auto body and frame repair work.

I'm working on restoring an art deco-ish styled steel case for a small Porto-Power set. The really bad looking one is what's on the case. I've re-created the Porto-Power lettering and the indian head from scratch.

What I need are fonts as close as possible to the black lettering. I can add the tails or whatever on the tops of the A's by hand.

AttachmentSize
blackh.jpg315.77 KB
blackh-bad.jpg106.11 KB

I think I've found a pretty good match for the small text at the bottom. Gotham Rounded... buuuut it ain't a freebie. Quite nice font, absolutely has the look of a font made with a lettering guide used in drafting.

Poking around the web some more I found RockoELF http://www.fontspace.com/casady-and-greene/rockoflf I can stretch it sideways a bit to match the slightly squat shape on the logo.

I think I should be able to find a font with the different stroke weights of the small Blackhawk text. I've seen many fonts like that, usually with 'deco' in the name.

The large Blackhawk text is what there seems to be nothing like. It has the weight and stroke widths and bulbous serifs of fonts like Cooper Black, *but* they're also concave serifs. It's like Cooper on a diet, practically anorexic. ;) If I end up having to construct it by hand I may just create a whole font based on it, at least the basic letters and digits.

Found exactly what I need for the small Blackhawk, already installed. :) BrittanicEFBold I've attached a 25% size image of my recreated version. The original is 4.5" diameter.

Just have to find something close to that large type, I can erase little divots to make the concave serifs.

I'd try Magnesium Regular for the small thick & thin Blackhawk rather than Brittanic, or at least tweak Britannic's slightly awkward curved-in C. Also the o and e on the original of Porto-Power don't have the flat tops you've given them in your version. They match the curve of the P better.

The geek in me wants to do some optical corrections and nudge a few of those curves ever so slightly. And he wants to digitize the rest of the lettering as well. And his head hurts when he sees the kerning in the small print.

Just for the record, the rounded type of the original might be Breite Runde Grotesk
http://www.flickr.com/photos/n1ke/5117261326/
or its Anglo-Saxon counterpart (I think there was one called Round Gothic)

I gave up on trying to find anything close to the big Blackhawk lettering and knocked it together from scratch in a nonstop session.

I have only been able to find three examples of this style of the logo, and they're all slightly different, especially the large Blackhawk letters.

One of them has big differences in the Indian head and its large Blackhawk lettering doesn't appear to have the concave serifs, but it's hard to tell due to the small image size, and overall it's much lighter, with the A feathers thinner and straighter.

The other example has almost the same Indian head as this one but the big Blackhawk lettering is somewhere in between.

I'm calling it good enough for restoring the tool case. :)

Should anyone want to muck about with this, just ask and I'll e-mail you the PSD files. While doing the big Blackhawk letters I also made an I and a V while making the H and W. The original letters were inconsistent a whole bunch with the serifs so I made one then copied and scaled it as needed. Since all the BLACK part was obscured except the tip of the lower leg of the K, I had to wing it on the B, L and C. They're based on those letters from the "intermediate" style but using the building blocks I made doing the HAWK part. KHAWK is placed exactly as in the original, I used a square shape as a one shot measuring stick to space the B from the left edge of the hexagon then nudged the LAC around until they looked good enough to me.

It's not absolutely perfect, but the hand drawn original wasn't perfect. I did adjust the centering of the small text and the hexagon was somewhat irregular, with the sides vertical the top and bottom points weren't right on center.

I'd love to have a whole font of these characters, just because of those funky bulbous/concave serifs that're unlike anything I've ever seen on a font. I might get around to doing a TTF if I ever get un-busy enough from my classic car plastic parts reproduction business. I have done a TrueType font a few years ago, based on the KING COBRA 5.0 letters used on the 1978 Mustang King Cobra, even did lowercase.

A font based on the Porto-Power letters would also be nifty, but inventing 25 more stylized caps that have the same look and feel as those P's? Ack! I'll leave that up to people who do things like create an entire font based on four letters, like the Nash script font used by the Nash Car Club for their magazine.

On close inspection, I think the small, bold BLACKHAWK letters are actually Franklin Gothic (No. 2, in digital), somewhat spaced out. Brittanic is more of a WWI-era face. The smallest type is probably Venus.

The better condition of the two samples in the original post probably is Franklin Gothic, but it is the tattier one that is being matched.
http://typophile.com/files/blackh-bad.jpg

Captured from web.archive.org on 16 Apr 2011. view this capture