[TheForge] Re: trade secrets

[Mike]

Bruce> Question: What do you mean by "frozen zinc in a tank"?

Um, say what?  Frozen zinc would typically be zinc that is below its
melting point.  A tank would be a thing that would be able to hold the
zinc even if it weren't frozen.  One might even infer from the mention
of "tank" and the choice of the word "frozen" rather than, say,
"solid" or "chunk", that there was reason to believe that it had
recently been molten.

Bruce> Was he doing true galvanizing (electroplating with zinc) or was
Bruce> he doing hot-dipping into molten zinc?

Yeah, yeah, I know that the word "galvanize" derives from Luigi
Galvani's name and might be thought, by etymological inference, to be
electrical in nature.  And they sell "galvanized pails" that are
actually pails made from galvanized sheet and made water-tight with
paint-on stickum. So nobody knows just what "galvanize" means.  But in
the hand-forged marine hardware context, and in the big-tank-of-metal
context, galvanized means hot-dip.  No frog's legs.

Vernon had an object the size of a very large bath tub, apparently filled
completely with a solid chunk of stuff that he claimed was zinc.
There were various accessories attached that appeared, on casual
examination, to be a means of heating the bath tub.

> Just how good a look did you get of that magic metal?

A very poor one.  I'm sure it wasn't his daddy's fountain pen or a
shiny pocket knife.

> Did he give you any indication of how it was used or what it was
> used for?

For: 

To make hot-dip galvanizing work mo' better for him than it did for
anybody who didn't use it. Viz. magic.

How:

My impression, reconstructed from 30-year old memory, is that he sort
of swizzled the tip of it around briefly on the surface of the molten
zinc before starting to dip.  But I don't recall that he said that
explicitly.

> You see, I expect there are a limited number of metals it might have
> been.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it wasn't polonium or tungsten or lead.  Tin,
silver, cadmium (ack!), gold. What does pure antimony look like?  

> He may even have expected you to recognise it when he showed it to
> you.

Well, you know how *that* goes.  If I *had* known just what it was, he
just woulda had to find something else that would stump the Young
Upstart and prove that the Old Man (altho he wasn't all that old then)
knew a thing or two.

> With a little more info, we might be able to puzzle this out.

He got rid of the galvanizing setup years ago so forensic
investigation is out unless we could get permission to excavate the
site.  If he's as cranky 10 years into retirement as he was then, he
still won't tell me.


- Mike