[Jewelry making - Article 00042] - Re: [Orchid] Before rolling mills

[Peter W . Rowe]

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    forging and hammering.  Lots of tedious forging and hammering. 
    Prior to drawplates and rolling mills, our raw materials of sheet and
    wire which  we take for granted, represented already a lot of hand
    labor to fabricate just  the sheet and wire. But it did present some
    opportunintes that we'd find difficult, or at least not so obvious. 
    Some medieval armor, for example, is made of steel sheet that varies
    a great deal in thickness.  It's thickest where the  protection is
    most needed, thinning out where the needs are less, to cut the
    weight.   When the sheet metal being used is forged from an ingot in
    the first place, and  the skills to do that are second nature, then
    either making sheet metal with variable thickness as desired, or
    simply forging the metal as it's being  made into an object to
    control the sheet metal's thickness "on the fly",  becomes also
    second nature.  We, without those built in forging skills, tend to
    leave  our sheet metal "as is", even if the piece would improve with
    changes in  thickness. 

    And with wire, in particular, getting highly uniform shape and
    thickness obviously requires a tremendous amount of work.  One of the
    more common hallmarks of forgeries of work that would have been made
    prior to the introduction of drawplates, is that few forgers will
    take the time to  manually make the wire, and drawplates leave marks,
    even if only that the  thickness and cross sectional shape of the
    wire is so very uniform that it might be  unlikely to have been
    manually made "the old way".  more common is simply finding  drawing
    striations on the wire from the drawplate.   Wire made before
    drawplates  was often done by taking sheet metal, and, often with a
    chisel, cutting an  even spiral shape, which would then be
    straightened out to form a long narrow  strip. Gentle hammering,
    burnishing, and the like would then even out the shape. if it needed
    to be reduced in size, annealing and stretching will also do it  
    (in addition to actual forging or the like), if you're very very
    careful not  to break it at thin spots.... 

    I've occasionally thought to myself that the skills required just to
     produce what we now consider our raw materials, in ancient work,
    might even have represented much or even most of the required work to
    produce some of the pieces.  Occasionally it's just mind blowing.  I
    recall seeing some  precolumbian (peruvian) work up very close, and
    marvelling at the precision of the  wire and sheet used to fabricate
    some of those intricate pieces, especially  knowing not just that the
    wire and sheet were hand formed, but that they were  probably formed
    not even with iron or metal tools, but rather with stone hammers 
    and natural abrasives... 

    Gives one reason to pause, now and then...   But remember that some
    of  these tools may go back farther than we realize.  I seem to
    recall reading  (probably in one of Jack Ogden's books.  Did I
    remember this right Mr. Ogden, of  you're reading this?) that
    drawplates were known in roman times... 

Peter


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