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.

Planishing

I previously mentioned planishing, which is when you strike the pewter with a small metal hammer to give it a dimpled finish. It is surprisingly difficult to control the hammer precisely, and if you miss the right spot you can just dent the piece instead. I am improving. I now manage not to dent the metal as often as I did. Yay me!

You won’t find much pewterwork with a planished finish, as it requires one person, a hammer and time. If you want to produce pewter hollowware (by that, I mean items not cast, such as beer mugs, bowls, vases, etc) more quickly or cheaply, you’ll have to go with a shiny or satin finish. We do a lot of work with shiny finishes, which requires buffing the piece upon completion and looks like this:

A satin finish is a dull sheen that is produced by holding steel wool against the piece once you have spun it and while it is still spinning on the lathe. It takes only a few seconds and so is the fastest and easiest finish to produce, and therefore the one favoured by companies mass-producing items, such as Royal Selangor. It is also one we don’t use.

My father has several hammers he uses for planishing, but his favourite is the one he inherited from his mentor, Doug Shenstone. This is convenient, because my favourite hammer is the one he used to use, which is slightly lighter and smaller.

There is still a marked difference between my planishing and my father’s. This is a bowl I just did:

Here is my father’s version:

This is what mine looks like on the inside:

This is what my father’s looks like:

And here are the two pieces side by side:

It is easy to see how much more regular and even my father’s planishing is. It isn’t really that my planishing is bad at the this point (although, sometimes it still is). It’s still, in my humble opinion, a very pretty finish. It’s just random, whereas my father’s is very regular. Think of it as the difference of handmade.

Little Boxes*

After messing up a few bowls and baby mugs, my father and I decided I should try spinning some smaller items, so we switched to candle snuffers. You would be amazed at how many people actually use snuffers to put out their candles rather than just blowing them out.

My father spun one to demonstrate, then went off to garden, leaving me to my own devices. Then I spun one, and it worked! It looked just like his. I put it beside the first one and started a third. My dad wandered back in to check on my progress and looked at the two snuffers on the table.

“They are too flared,” he said.

“That one is yours,” I pointed out.

“Oh,” he said. “Well they’re okay then.”

These are the joys of hand-made. I made the rest less flared. Now, if you want a candle snuffer, you have a more options. Isn’t that thoughtful of us?

Spun snuffers waiting to have handles attached.

Having successfully spun something small, I then wanted to try to make little boxes. I am somewhat obsessed with little boxes. I made a medium small square one, then I made a tiny one, about the size of a matchbox. I love it. It is cute. I forgot to take a photo, though, so you’ll just have to trust me on that.

My father pointed out that the effort that goes into cute little square boxes makes them a bad choice, because I’d have to charge too much money to make them worth the time. But spinning round boxes is much easier, so that is what I set out to do. He gave me a wooden chuck that he uses to make something else, but would work for this with a smaller disc of metal. I spun five.

Waiting to be spun

The box is almost finished. I use a chisel to trim the edge before pressing the lip up against the chuck to finish it.

Some of them I left smooth, and some I planished (hammered). My spinning wasn’t perfect, and with some of the boxes there were small lines in the pewter or the sides weren’t quite straight. Those ones I planished, which removes the small defects.

Now, lids. Hinged lids are appealing, but again take more time. So I cut out two circles of metal for each lid; one slightly bigger than the dimensions of the box, and one slightly smaller. I then soldered them together, so when you put the lid on the box, the smaller disc inside holds the lid on.

Waiting to have the lids assembled.

I left some plain, but I experimented with decorating the lids of most of them. A while ago, I made a smaller tzedakah box, and painted the letters. I really liked that effect, so I wanted to see what I could do with the little boxes.

Small tzedakah box with painted letters

The heart shape is soldered on, waiting to be painted.

Finished

A lid for a planished box

I’d show you the others, but they were already gone before I remembered to take photos. My father is in the Red Trillium Studio Tour this weekend, so the boxes are already there. If you are looking for something fun to do this weekend in the Ottawa area, you could go on the tour and see my dad’s awesome stuff for yourself, and tell me if you like the boxes. Any interesting ideas for decorations on the top of the boxes are welcome too!

*How many of you now have Pete Seeger going through your head?

Spinning Sucks

Well, my spinning sucks, anyway. My father makes it look easy.

I wrote those to lines about a week ago, and life then just got in the way, a lot. Now only some of my spinning sucks. Nice to see there’s progress.

My dad demonstrated either a lot of faith in my ability to pick this stuff up, or was just not thinking things through, and started me on big things. Wait, I’m going to back up a bit. Here’s how you spin something:

Everything we spin has to start as a circle. My father has written down on cue cards how big the circle of pewter needs to be depending on the object to be made. Just to make it fun, sometimes he writes down the radius and sometimes he writes down the diameter, and sometimes he doesn’t indicate which one it is that he’s written down. And usually his handwriting is illegible. Thankfully, that hasn’t been an issue so far, as he looks it up and just tells me. I measure out the radius on one of these useful pointy mathy things:

Drawing a circle

Then I cut out the circles, using either the scroll saw or a hand saw, depending on my mood and the size of the piece of metal.

My dad has wooden chucks of different shapes. Affix the right one on the lathe and use a smaller one to screw the metal in tight. The first step at this point is to turn the lathe on and use wooden stick to press against the spinning disc while it isn’t tight, in order to center it. My father just leaves it loose, turns on the lathe, centers the metal and then tightens it the lathe. I tighten the lathe, turn it on, then loosen it, etc., because I am convinced that otherwise the metal disc will go flying off and maim me. This not a random fear. See the gouge in the wall? My dad did that, not me.

This is way high up on the wall opposite the lathe.

Fortunately, the wall is the only thing that was ever maimed, and only once, and we wear face shields to protect our pretty pretty faces.

See all the wooden chucks on the wall?

Next, we use either wooden or metal sticks to press the metal up against the wooden chuck.

The stick in the left hand is for counter pressure.

Pewter is a soft metal, so you’d think this would be easy, but it is so soft that you can fairly easily press too hard and cause the metal to tear apart.

Like this!

This is NOT how it is supposed to look.

This is wrecked. I have messed up spinning in less bad ways – rippling the metal and such – and my father has managed to fix those.

Fixing my mistake.

But after several of these experiences, I suggested that perhaps we should just start me on smaller items. That’s when things got better.

That will be the next post.