[TheForge] Re: trade secrets

[Bruce Freeman]

Mike,

Question:  What do you mean by "frozen zinc in a
tank"?  Was he doing true galvanizing (electroplating
with zinc) or was he doing hot-dipping into molten
zinc?  Just how good a look did you get of that magic
metal?  Did he give you any indication of how it was
used or what it was used for?

You see, I expect there are a limited number of metals
it might have been.  He may even have expected you to
recognise it when he showed it to you.  With a little
more info, we might be able to puzzle this out.

Bruce
NJ

--- Mike <mspencer at tallships.ca> wrote:

> 
> 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/                  
>      ^^-^^
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