Is it Pewter?

I discovered something interesting when I started my Etsy shop. Of course, once I posted my items, I did a search to see if they came up. Searching for ‘pewter bowl’ did bring up my pewter bowl. It also brought up paintings of pewter bowls and ‘antique’ pewter bowls (if you don’t keep polishing it, pewter can turn a darker gray quite quickly, so sometimes ‘antiques’ aren’t actually very old) and, to my surprise, a lot of items that aren’t pewter at all.

Many people like pewter because it is pretty and shiny, similar to silver and yet much cheaper than silver. Silver is a precious metal. Pewter is an alloy (which is a mixture of elements – in this case 92% tin, 6% copper and 2% antimony).

While it is cheaper that silver, that doesn’t make it cheap. Especially when it is handmade holloware such as my father and I do, where each piece is created by hand (as opposed to cast items, which are faster to turn out).

There’s another metal alloy called armetale. It can only be cast and it is harder than pewter. It is produced by Wilton Armetale. Like pewter, it turns darker gray with time. The thing about armetale is that it is both much cheaper than pewter and often confused with pewter. I have to confess this drives me a little bit nuts, mostly because my stuff is competing with it and I look really expensive in comparison.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with armetale as an alloy. If you want items that are tough and inexpensive, it’s great. The problem comes when people buy it thinking that they are getting a great price on pewter. This isn’t something that only bugs me, as I found a post on ebay entilted RWP Wilton Armetale is Not Pewter. A search for ‘Wilton pewter’ on ebay returns hundreds of items.

If you find ‘pewter’ labelled ‘Wilton’, what you have really found is armetale. Another way to tell is to look for a touchmark. Pewter virtually always has a touchmark on the bottom identifying who has created the piece. Armetale does not.

My father’s touchmark

I want to make it clear that I am not degrading armetale. I just want people to realize what they are getting. If you want armetale, go for it. But if you want pewter, make sure that great deal you found is the real thing.

Proof of Black Holes

When my kids lose something, even if they had it mere moments before, they frequently lament its loss as though it is just completely gone forever as opposed to clearly somewhere in their room, or the car, or whatever. And I always say to them, “Look again. It isn’t like there’s a small wandering black hole in our house sucking things into it.”

However, it turns out there IS one in my father’s workshop.

I was working on my little boxes, making the lids. I cut the Star of Davids (or should that be Stars of David?) out and was buffing the tops before moving on to the next step. The buffer is a cloth wheel that spins very quickly. We add buffing compound, which makes the process a dirty one as it makes the pewter nice and shiny, so my father has rigged up a fan to suck away the debris.

It ain’t pretty, but it works.

Because the wheel is spinning so quickly, it sometimes grabs whatever we are buffing and flings it away. It either hits the wall or, if it is smaller, it gets sucked away into the fan. It rattles down the tubing and, if we are unlucky, into a canvass dust-collector. If we stop the fan quickly enough, it will just be in the tube and easy enough to get out.

All the yuck ends up in here.

So there I was happily buffing a little lid when the buffer grabbed it out of my hand and flung it away. However, I didn’t hear a tell-tale ‘thunk’ of it hitting the wall or rattling of the tube, so I didn’t know where it ended up. I checked around the buffer. Nope. I undid the tubing at the joint where we normally find things. Nope. That left the canister itself. I unhooked the thing and dragged it out to the lawn.

Well, at least it isn’t very full.

A close-up:

I felt around inside. I got dirty(ier). I found nothing. No lid in the icky dust-collector. No lid on the floor. No lid in the tubes. No lid. Just gone. Therefore: black hole.

I made another one, and I buffed it all nice and shiny. See?

It’s a start

I actually sold a couple small boxes from my Etsy store yesterday. I think these are my first official sales. Yay me!

So today in the shop I was spinning some more of them. I haven’t had a lot of time there in the past few days, thanks to kid schedules.

This is what the stuff I was producing looked like:

Meanwhile, in the morning while I was doing mom stuff my father started making a couple beer mugs. By the time I got there, he was soldering on the handles:

Here’s what he had by the end of the day:

Aren’t they pretty? He spun them using several different chucks – far beyond where I am at. I can make some pretty things, but I have a way to go …

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.

Successes

I may have seemed a little whiny in that last post. But I didn’t want to give the impression that this is just all easy, or that it is just this steady climb towards success. There are ups and downs, and last week was kind of a down. So I figured today I’ll tell you about a couple successes. A little while ago, I tried spinning the pieces for a large candleholder. I managed a couple, but then popped the bottom off two in a row, which was frustrating, so my dad offered to spin the rest of them.

Please note that there are THREE spun tops here with their bottoms popped off.

I would suspect him of trying to make me feel better, and except (thankfully), he’s not the sort of person who would coddle me that way. I actually love spinning. It feels kind of powerful to take a piece of metal and so quickly form a shape out of it. And I am improving. I spun the outer pieces and inner pieces for this candle holder.

Candleholder waiting to be buffed all shiny.

The first time I spun the outer piece, it was surprisingly difficult to get one ridge formed properly. By the 6th and final one, it was a breeze. I can’t figure out how it goes from feeling impossibly awkward to easy, just like that. My father not only does not coddle me, he appears to have great faith in my nascent abilities. Back when we first started, he showed me how to spin porringer bowls, which involves rolling the lip of the bowl at the end. (This adds strength to the bowl so it isn’t as easy to dent out of shape during use, which is important with such a soft metal.) I wasn’t very successful at that part. I wasn’t so successful at any of it, really, but it was the first thing I tried to spin. Nevertheless, when he was going to be away for the afternoon, he suggested I spin some more, and left me to it. I confess to thinking him a wee bit nuts, but I do know the basics of spinning and it is a small bowl, so really, how hard could it be?

Not yet a bowl

Hey, bowl shaped! Trimming the edge before rolling the lip.

Not hard at all, actually. Even rolling the lip, something I am not sure I did successful at all last time, was quite easy. I was ridiculously pleased with myself.

Rolled lip!

A couple of days ago, he and my mother were going out, so he suggested I could try making the lids for some round boxes he’d spun. Wooden lids. Would you like to know the last time I tried turning wood on the lathe? Never, that’s when. But he handed me this:

And told me to turn it into this:

Then he left. And I did. Even more fun, because the piece of wood was thicker, I got to taper the top as well.

Turning wood is fun, although the sawdust isn’t. Now, this is pretty simple stuff, but still, it is simple stuff I didn’t know how to do before, and now I do.

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.

More planishing

My father tells me that I missed pointing out something important about planishing. I did mention it briefly when I first started this blog, but not in my last post. Before the use of spinning to shape the metal, pewtersmiths used wooden mallets to hammer the metal into the required shape – in fact, that is still the way it is done at times. However, doing so leaves marks. Spinning also frequently leaves marks. So, planishing is pretty, but it is also funtional – it gets rid of the marks created in shaping whatever we are making.

Here’s a disk I spun to make the lid to a sugar bowl. You can see the marks left by the stick I used to press the metal against the wooden chuck.

Here’s another of the disks, after I planished it, but before I did the final shaping or buffing:

The marks are gone.

After planishing, I put the disk back on the lathe and spun it a bit further, shaping the lip and then trimming it with a chisel. The final step is to solder the little acorn on as a handle.

Here’s what the lid looks like complete and buffed all shiny and pretty:

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.