Sunday 8 June 2014

Terrifying story


Every now and then, my work takes me off in a completely different direction from the stone and marble that it is supposed to consist of, and I love it. You know how I like tangents - I believe I may have mentioned it before, quite recently.

So it is with this zinc bucket. It was made as a liner to a large, oval, white marble urn which I have just finished restoring, and it has a couple of holes in it as well as the base coming away from the walls in places.

It was decided (by me) that it would be too dangerous to weld it - zinc gives off a lethal white smoke when burned, which will even be absorbed through the skin - so I have willingly taken on the job of putting it back together again, using tarnished zinc-tinted resin and glass fibre tissue.

To get the ingredients for this, I traveled back to the shape-shifting ingredients shop which lies somewhere between Melksham and Devizes, almost at the foot of an ancient and strikingly stark hill-fort, where many important battles have been fought. It had not moved since I was last there, so I found it quite easily.

This place - I think I mentioned it before as well - is run by a Christian sect, which I believe may be Plymouth Brethren, but you would only guess this by the lack of women in the warehouse, and that all the menfolk seem to be related.

The last time I went there to buy some specialist plaster, I was handed a free gift by the cheery bloke in the dispatch department - a bottle of rather nice, Rose wine. This time as I was leaving, he opened a large box and extracted a tube which had the company logo and web address, etc. It turned out to contain some very pleasant, sweet oat biscuits. I had only spent about £7, and if these biscuits were on sale in Waitrose, they would have been about £4. It is such a strange place, for a variety of reasons.

I had already treated the inside of the bucket with hydrochloric acid, wrongly believing those white specks to be a calcium build-up caused by about 200 years of hard water trickling over it, but they - as it turns out - are pure zinc oxide. 'Zinc White', in fact, the same stuff as the Lead White substitute - that is next to impossible to buy these days - is made of.

As I was trying to remove what I thought to be calcite from the inside of the bucket, I suddenly had a brainwave. Why not just add to it?

I knew that, somewhere on my client's estate, there is what is known as a 'petrifying spring'. These rare springs are so pack-full of saturated calcium carbonate, that any object left in the flowing water will be - in quite a short period of time - given an even coating of off-white stone.

I thought that this would be such a romantically fitting patina to give the old bucket, that I emailed my client that night to suggest it.

He replied by saying that - just for the moment - we will see what the bucket looks like in its repaired, natural state, then take it from there. I can just see him rolling his eyes at the estate manager when explaining what mad scheme I had come up with this time.

A few years ago, I bought a job-lot of fossilised wood - about two tons, in fact - from a local dealer.

Before I arrived and bought the lot, he was trying to sell it in small, individual pieces placed strategically around the shop, and he had asked his wife to write little cards for them with a description and price on each one.

When he put them up, he saw that his wife had labeled them. 'Terrified Wood'.


29 comments:

  1. I didn't quite follow the process your described, but it must be true, and will turn out well or not, in any case.
    A friend has a domed butter dish that was turned a pinkish color by long immersion in a spring containing some mineral. She broke the dome. Later I found the same dome, sans base and gave it to her. Sadly, the spring is in another part of the country.

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    1. That's a good excuse for a little trip to that part of the country, if you needed one.

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    2. The immersion time is long, as I recall. Six months or a year. I wonder it they emerge born again, as well as pinko.

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    3. Maybe, but scratch the surface and you will find the same old sinner as before the baptism.

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    4. I saw the butter dish this afternoon. It was in a sulfur spring and is a mellow yellow gold. So much for my testimony.

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  2. We've just had zinc guttering installed at the barn; the individual lengths were soldered together, and look good.

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    1. Yes, the metal man said he would solder it like it had been, but said he would use zinc for the solder, as they did. To my mind, that's called 'welding', isn't it? Anyway, the metal is so thin where it has gone, that it would be a nightmare to fix.

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  3. Some wood is terrifying.

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    1. There is a fungus which turns branches of wood into a pure, copper green. It is highly sought by cabinet makers, because the green never fades.

      'Noble Rot' - which is what I talk (and drink) most of the time.

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  4. We had a lot of these, on a bigger scale, on the farm for the animals to drink from. I thought it was galvanised tin. Is that the same thing? They sold well and are very popular for I don't know what; P had one for bathing in at his house when there wasn't a bathroom. He has got a bathroom now but he doesn't know what happened to the tin bath.

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    1. Those are usually galvanised steel, whereas this one is pure zinc. It's a planter, which is what those ones which sell well are used for. I think if you filled a bath tub made of pure zinc up and got into it, it might collapse if it wasn't thick enough. H.I. used to bath in one when she was a kid too - they didn't get a bathroom in Sheffield until she was much older.

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  5. This made me laugh Tom. Apart from the 'terrified' - we once went round a petrified forest somewhere in the US (can't remember where) and I bought a piece, suitably polished up and mounted on a bit of green baize. It was quite expensive. I don't know how much you paid for the job lot but I can't help wondering (if you still have it) whether it might be worth polishing and mounting bits as and when you have time!

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    1. I bought an entire tree-trunk including roots once, and sold it to Jacob Rothschild. It started life in Dorset, but now lives on Corfu. Those two tons were North African, and as hard as iron, mainly because they were 90% iron, so I only polished one bit and sold the rest at a loss.

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    2. P.S. I used to have a massive, opalised bit from Arizona, and this would be worth about £10,000 if I hadn't sold it for a few hundred in 1969.

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  6. I didn't get the whole chemical side of things but this is a step up from avocado tray mask making. You are skilled in many fields.

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    1. I'm with iris
      I got an unclassified in my cse physics

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    2. Hydrochloric acid eats calcium, but leaves metal unscarred. That's all you really needed to know, if you needed to know it at all.

      All masons know about this, because most masons can never be bothered to clean their trowels until the stuff on them has set hard.

      End of physics lecture.

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  7. Your client should trust you more; sounds like a brilliant, if a time consuming and terrifying, experiment.

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    1. I am trusted by him to the extent that - unless I clash with his family's artistic tastes - my word is usually taken. He does like to keep me in check, though.

      The time consumed in this particular exercise is merely water under the bridge.

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  8. I see quite a lot of Plymouth Brethren ladies in huge groups in the outlet centre in Gloucester. The older ladies had long denim skirts and beautiful hair. With a small triangular head scarf. Now it would seem the younger girls are finding loop holes and wear their hair differently and wear wide head bands instead of the triangles. And not long denim skirts. Weird how you notice these things.

    Could we have a picture if you get to put the bowl in the spring. I would like to see the results.

    Question... in your opinion in a bathroom would you go for Greek marble or Italian...? Heavy use en suite shower room... Never had marble before. want to make sure it is the right choice.

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    1. White Greek marble has a very sparkly appearance, and the added advantage of being very cheap compared to the pure white Italian stuff.

      I love the white, Greek marble for surfaces, etc - it is called 'Thassos', and seems to be made of big, Christmas card-type flecks which glitter nicely.

      To carve, however, you need to be paying about £6 per kilo for the Italian stuff.

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    2. Oh, and if I ever get to dip my thing into the terrifying stream, I will post the pictures on Molly's site...

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    3. 'Terrifying Scream' would have got me more hits...

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  9. Couldn't help but be reminded of this. Someone had to be:

    http://youtu.be/ElLpKewnxp4

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    1. Well I managed to resist it, but I suppose someone had to do it. I went straight to You Tube and as soon as I saw it, I switched it off. I don't want that running through my head all day.

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  10. Thanks Tom I will add this to the list Thassos. Glittery. You had me with that word straight away.

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