Short day

Yesterday, I finished these:

They are little boxes my dad designed, about 2.5″ wide, with the lids I learned the very basics of wood-turning on. The knobs are cast and then trimmed on the lathe, and then I put a little maple leaf on some. Basically, if the knob looked really good after I  trimmed it, I left it plain. If it looked less than perfect, I soldered a little maple leaf on the top.

I cut the post to the right length.

Then I very gently hammered the edges of post flat, so that the knob will never come out of that hole again.

because it’s hard …

There are moments, in the shop, when I feel overwhelmed. There’s so much to learn. My father had the advantage of being a metallurgical engineer when he started, and my lack of a scientific background sometimes makes me feel as though I really started from behind the 8 ball. It isn’t just the pewtering, but the machines we use to create the finished product. When the lathe or the buffer doesn’t work properly, I don’t know how to fix them and just have to wait for my father.

I want to learn it all fast. I’m now 47 years old. One thing I am working on, with age, is letting go of regrets, such as ‘I wish I’d started this sooner’. Regrets really are completely pointless. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the pressure of time. And, while I am admitting things, I do wonder if it is crazy to try to learn a whole new skill set at my age.

Add to that my fibromyalgia and the separation process – mediation, endless discussions and looking for a new place to live – and sometimes I want to just curl up into a fetal ball under the bed. I’ve been in a great deal of pain the past few days. A good way to describe it is to think of how your whole body aches when you have a bad fever. Add exhaustion, stomach pain too severe to really eat and upset guts and you’ll have a fairly accurate picture of where I am at right now. It makes pewtering tougher. Which is why I am writing this instead.

Plus, I am working on setting up an Etsy shop, and possibly eBay too. My dad has a website, but I am trying to drag him even further onto the internet. He’s being remarkably willing to go along with all this, but then, my parents have embraced all the 21st century has to offer. (They may be in their 70s, but they both have iPads!) So stay turned for more info on our expanding online presence.

Anyway, two things made me feel somewhat better this week, despite the pain and doubt. One was a quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson:  “In whatever you choose to do, do it because it is hard, not because it is easy.” I think he might be paraphrasing John F. Kennedy. Whatever – it helped me focus on the fact that true accomplishment doesn’t come from mastering something easy. It’s succeeding at the difficult stuff that matters.

The other thing was fun in the workshop. It doesn’t take much to amuse me, I should point out. First, my dad showed me how to use this machine:

Up until now, it has had a cover over it and we used it to put stuff on. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, so I only have photos I took with my iPod that aren’t the greatest quality. This machine is filled with tiny smooth pieces of metal. The little tube on the left pours in a soap solution and the machine spins the contents around, vibrating them, which polishes them.  My father uses it for small cast items, which are very difficult to buff. We tossed in handles and spoons and Christmas decorations.

It was so fun to watch and the child in me wanted to just grab all kinds of things and toss them in to see what happens. In fact, I’ve already warned my father that my youngest and I would be back here with rocks,  to see what the polisher does to them.

Filtering out the polished pieces.

The other thing we did was take all the pewter dust, shavings and trimmings from sweeping up the shop and melt it down. Because it burns off a lot of garbage, my father moves the hot pot outside for the job. So I took the contents of this:

Melted it down:

And turned it into these:

Melting stuff is fun.

You Spin Me Right Round, Baby

So, more about spinning, as requested by Amy.

A lathe is a machine that spins stuff very quickly. Is that too simplistic a place to start? My father has all kinds of wooden shapes he has created (and some he inherited from his mentor, Doug Shenstone), called chucks. They are either hanging on the wall behind the lathe, or piled up on shelves beside that area.

The lathe and chucks hanging behind it.

More chucks!

This is how they are organized: my dad sometimes remembers where he put the one he wants. He does, thankfully, write what each one is for on the chuck itself. Once I can actually read his handwriting, that will be very helpful. (Okay, to be fair, he’s started labelling each one legibly now, just for me!)

To spin something, we afix the correct chuck to one end of the lathe, puts a smaller wooden piece on the other end and tighten a metal disc between the two.

Here’s a plate-shaped chuck:

Here’s the resulting plate, partially planished. My dad did this. I’m not at this point yet.

We grease the metal with beeswax (which, as a bonus, smells nice) and then use either a metal or wooden spinning tool to push the metal into the shape of the chuck.

In the above photo, my father is using a metal spinning tool in his right hand to push the pewter against the chuck. The wooden stick in his left hand is used to provide counter-pressure and stop the metal from warping. The tricky part with spinning is to press hard enough to move the metal, but not so hard that gets too thin and snaps, or that it starts warping.

Here’s a successfully spun cup and an unsuccessfully spun one with a tear in the metal where it got too thin. Below is an even bigger fail, where the lathe likely wasn’t tight enough and the metal disc became uncentered. Both of these are my screw-ups, in case that isn’t glaringly obvious. The dark streaks are grease.

Here’s a photo of my father half-way though spinning the same type of cup successfully. At this point, he no longer needs the stick in his left hand for counter-pressure and just moves the spinning tool back and forth to move the metal.

Once the pewter is in the shape of the chuck, we trim it with a chisel.

That can be fun because it sometimes causes pewter streamers to fly everywhere, resulting in whomever is spinning looking a bit like a christmas tree with tinsel hanging everywhere.

Pewter trimmings hanging off the lathe

So, them’s the basics. The basics are all I’ve gotten anywhere near mastering. My father does far more complicated things I have not yet tackled, like using multiple chucks to produce vases with thin necks. And, the bigger the piece of metal, the harder it is to spin, so I’m still only successful with the smaller stuff. 

Something New

I’m alive! It’s summer – can I use that as my latest excuse for my appalling lax behaviour in updating my blog? Let’s go with that.

I have several posts on the go, but I am leap-frogging over them to show you the latest cool thing.

My father’s mentor, Doug Shenstone, had a very different style than my father has. One thing he did that I really like is fluting. Because pewter is soft, you have to reinforce bowl rims so they don’t dent. The easiest way is to roll the lip. Another way is fluting. It takes more time, but I think the result is very pretty. Here’s a bowl Doug made for my mother shortly before he died:

My father had no interest in fluting, so he actually got rid of some of the equipment Doug used (which, I confess, amazed me because my father is – how shall I put this? – an enormous pack rat). But since I was interested, we decided to try it.

First, we made this thing. We don’t know what the call it. It’s our fluting thingie. We made it from toasted maple, in case anyone is interested. It may be too soft for our purposes, but it works for now.

I spun a bowl and planished it. Then I put it on this sheet that let me mark the bowl evenly where I wanted to flute.

We first practiced on a crappy bowl that was kicking around the workshop. I think both my daughter and I used it to learn (in my case relearn) to planished.

To make the flute marks, you have to hold the bowl against the fluting thingie we don’t know the proper name for, then use a hammer and something sharp to create the line. The first thing we discovered is that the process requires three hands – one to hold the bowl steady, one to hold the wedge in the correct spot, and one to hammer. This is a mild annoyance, mostly because it seems that there really should be a way to make this a one-person job.

Doug used a brass wedge to make the lines in the bowl, but my dad figured that a wooden wedge would make for smoother lines, so we tried that out too, and he was right. So that is what I used to make the flute marks along my bowl.

The practice bowl, brass wedge and wooden wedge that we used.

Finally, I cut out and filed smooth little Vs to finish off the shape.

This is the final product. I am very happy with it and I think I will continue working with fluting, but I sure would love to figure out a way to make it a one-person job.

How to Become a Pewtersmith

Since the Middle Ages, people learned trades such as metal smithing through an apprenticeship. An apprentice was taken on by a master craftsman, usually working for years for nothing more than room and board in exchange for being taught the trade. Doug Shenstone, who taught my father how to pewter, learned his craft this way. After apprenticing, the next step is becoming a journeyman for several years. Finally, the journeyman creates a significant piece meant to showcase his (usually, pewtersmiths were men, but there have always been exceptions) skill, and presents it to the master. If the ‘master piece’ is accepted, the apprentice himself becomes a master.

Doug Shenstone went through this process in the 1930s in Ontario, becoming Canada’s only native-born master pewtersmith. The scarcity of metal after WWII drove him into a more traditional job with the government, but eventually he made his way back to pewtersmithing, working after hours in his shop in Ottawa.

Doug Shenstone in his workshop.

My father’s path was very different. He always had a workshop in the basement and puttered around there in his spare time (he was a metallurgical engineer with the government during the day). The hobbies he tried out that I remember were: oil painting, batik, candle-making (he insisted we hand over broken crayons to use for colour), wood-working and copper enamelling. Then one day, he went out to Shenstone’s workshop to buy a pair of wine goblets for my mother for their anniversary in 1976. Enthralled by what he saw there, he convinced a reluctant Shenstone, who was already in his 60s, to teach him how to pewter.

Colin Hamer in his workshop

Obviously, with a full-time job and young family to look after, there was no question of a true apprenticeship. The concept doesn’t fit with the modern world. My father visited Doug’s shop for lessons after work. Doug had no children and he and my father became close friends. They showed their work in shows together, with Doug’s contribution growing smaller as he aged. When he died at the age of 82 in 1992, he left his equipement and tools to my father, who uses much of it in his workshop.

For years, my father worked in a small workshop in our suburban basement. Machines such as the buffer and lathe are very noisy, and I remember that when it was dinnertime, often one of us kids would walk into the dining room above the workshop and jump on the floor so the vibrations would let my father know it was time to stop. That was where he first began to teach me how to pewter, when I was home from university during summers. Just over 15 years ago, he built himself a proper workshop in the back yard. It is a bigger space, but we still trip over each other in there. Of course, it doesn’t help that my father is a pack-rat. For example, here’s his dizzying array of files.

I think about 5 of them are really useable. Well, maybe 4 – in my opinion his roughest file really could be replaced. With the rest, my father picks them up one after another and says, “Nope, not that one, nope that’s not good, nope, nope …” and then puts them back. I’m starting to get good at recognizing the good ones, though.

An Reinvention

This is me: a middle-aged woman with three kids, two dogs, no career to speak of and a brand-new marital separation. I am a cliche – a housewife looking for a way to reinvent herself. I’ve picked an unusual reinvention, however – I am going to become a pewtersmith.

This isn’t as randomly crazy as it seems. My father is a pewtersmith and I spent time working with him while I was in university, so I know what I am getting into. But it has been over 20 years, so I am pretty much starting from scratch.

Even though I am trading in a keyboard for hammers as the tools of my trade, I’ll never just stop writing, so I thought it would be interesting to document my experience. Hence, this blog.

Let’s start with the basics. Pewter is an alloy – a metal composed of more than one element. Modern pewter is primarly tin, with some copper and antimony mixed in. For centuries, it also contained lead, but that hasn’t been the case for a couple hundred years. Pewter is a soft, flexible metal with a low melting point, which makes it relatively easy to work with. And since it is much less expensive than gold or silver, it has was historically popular for every day household items, such a bowls, beer mugs, dishes, etc.

Traditionally, pewtersmiths worked with hammers to shape items, primarily holloware such as bowls, cups, pitchers, and did some casting (melting the metal and pouring it into a mold) to create handles, knobs, spoons and the like. The methods have changed remarkably little, except that there are sanding belts and electric saws to make things easier – which doesn’t mean that files and hand saws aren’t still used. Probably the biggest difference is that, whereas my father’s mentor himself learned to hammer every bowl into its shape, my father uses a lathe to spin the metal into the desired shapes.

Curious as to how this:

turns into this?

Or this?

Or this?

Stay tuned …