[TheForge] Re: trade secrets

[Mike]

Ries> I think blacksmiths had some similar secrets...

Yarn...

The historic Walters blacksmith shop in Lunenburg is now, well,
history.  Some kind of crappy atiquee shopee in the building, the main
forge space for rent.

But 30 years ago, Vernon Walters was still running it, making all
kinds of gear for small fishing boats, trawlers, fish processing
plants and doing general smithing.  A lot of the marine gear had to be
galvanized and he had one of only two galvanizing tanks on the south
shore.  (The other one was in the equally historic Lunenburg "block
shop" that made tackle blocks and had their own in-house blacksmith as
well.)

Early on Vernon treated me like an urban weenie wannabe but eventually
he warmed up a bit and one day gave me a tour of the back of the shop,
including the galv room with its couple or three hundred gallons of
frozen zinc in a tank.  After we got back to the anvil, he said
something like, "You know what the secret is to good galvanizing?"  Of
course, I didn't.  From his back pocket he produced a stick of shiny
metal, kinda furtively, as if we were going to swap knives and didn't
want anybody to see us.  "That's it, right there, you need just a
touch of that", he said, and put it back in his pocket with a bit of a
smirk and wouldn't say any more about it.

Who knows?  A bit of silver added on top of the melt? Tin?  The
Philosophik Mercury?  Something everyone knows about but me?  Then, I
could probably have found out with a good library search at Dalhousie,
now probably on the internet.  But now the only place to get
galvanizing done is a big industrial shop in the city with a freight
car-sized tank and I don't imagine anybody there carries a piece of
magic metal in his hip pocket.  But I might be wrong. :-)


- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^