Completed Tin coated bolts

[Ornea]

Timestamp: Day 15 of Spring 515 AV
Location: Lucis and Lucis metalsmithing workshop

The continued inspections of the pulleys at Sharai had shown that some of the iron bolts on the machinery were in bad shape. Edward, always cautious and proactive, had decided that it was best to replace them. He didn't want troubles with the transports of heavy and bulky goods up to they city on the peaks, or delays in the transportation of sensitive fresh fish or meat. It wasn't that this would cause disaster for Lhavit; the people there were in their way quite tough and they were able, and they had the okomos. But it wouldn't be so good for Lucis and Lucis reputation, he said, if they allowed a pulley crash to happen despite how they would have been able to prevent it.

He had tasked Ornea with crafting the bolts. She saw this as a good opportunity to get to test the new thing she had learnt about coating metal items with tin in order to protect it from corrosion.

"Edward, I'd like to coat the bolts with tin and see if this makes them last longer in practice. I know I read up about the tin alloys and we have it in the report I made for you, but one thing is reading about it, and another things is testing it for real. It seems to be just theory so far. Or have you tried it before?"

"Well ... no ... " Edward Lucis didn't sound negative, but he didn't sound like he was going to just say yes either. Ornea was used to this. Her employer wanted facts and logical reasoning. It wasn't extra hard to convince him about things and persuade him, but he wanted explanations.

"It would be a good place to test the idea of tin coated bolts. It's outdoors, so the corrosion is much faster than inside buildings. I don't think we would be able to expose the bolts to damage the way nature can do. And it would be a full scale experiment too. We would get to see exactly how this works, for the pulleys. It could be a great improvement. And it's can't be worse than the normal iron bolts. There's no risk to this Edward. I admit the cost will be a little bit higher, but but not by much, if I use just a thin layer of tin. It may lead to a small increase in material cost, but if the corrosion resistance improves we'll not need to replace the tinned bolts so often. We can't know, but without trying this we'll never get to know. "

The last line was always good to add to the rhetoric. Edward hated the idea of new things not being found out and knowledge and improvement not happening, progress in metalworking and gadgeteering not being made.

The old man grabbed his chin with the right hand while he tought a bit about what he had said. After a while he spoke again, now to ask a question. "And are you able to do this very thin coating ? It's one thing to speak about it and another thing to really succeed with it. I don't have time to spend on bolts ... so it's you who must have the skill to carry out the crafting. Have you done something similar before?"

"You know I'm competent". It was true. She was competent. But she knew it wasn't her general competence Edward was asking for. He wanted to know what she thought herself able to do in this specific case. "I admit that I haven't made tin coated bolts before, and I will need to take care to get the tin layer very thin ... I guess this can be important in order to make them right size for the pulleys too. A challenge, but it's mostly about accuracy at the casting of the iron and proper rasping of the iron ... and I'll need to find an efficient way to apply the molten tin as well. It may take some experimentation. But yes, I think I will be able to do a good job of it."

Edward nodded. "Alright. Go ahead then. I'd like to see the bolts before we use them on a pulley though." He left the foundry area and Ornea guessed he was off to his office. Congratulating herself to her permission to try out her new ideas, she pulled on one of the leather aprons that were always hanging on the hook on the wall right at the entrance of the metalsmithing workplace, and started the preparations for the job.

...

[Ornea]

Just like every time Ornea was going to cast she had to start with getting the temperature of the foundry high enough for the metal to melt. And casting Iron demanded quite high heat. The fire in the foundry at Lucis was always burning, as they didn't want to have to heat it up for days every time they needed to craft something. It was more efficient and also more economic to keep it half hot. It would take for the foundry to become ready anyways, but not as if it had been cold at start.

The next thing Ornea did was pull on a pair of work gloves, take a shovel with a long shaft, and throw in coal to feed the fire. She knew it was just the first time and and she would need to add even more, so she shovelled in a generous amount of the black fuel.

This done, she started to prepare the molds. Being one of Lhavit's foremost smithies and specialized in gadgeteering they had molds for everything. Bolts were something Lucis made pretty often and for many ends, so Edward had invested in molds carved of stone. It was expensive, but as the crafting was recurrent and it was important that the size of the bolts was consequent it paid off, according to Edward.

Ornea fectched the correct bolt molds and put them in place in front of the foundry.

And now it was time to wait. The metalsmithing process wasn't fast. There was a lot of waiting time too. And she didn't like to just idle. She was going to fill the waiting time with other work, at some smaller side projects Edward had suggested for her training. There were always things to learn at Lucis. She like the feeling of making progress. And in particular she liked how the constant work kept her mind focused. She was under the impression that it helped against her overgiving issues.

...

[Ornea]

Ornea was well organized. Normally she always started by planning. And this was also her approach right now, no matter she was going to do smaller things.

Her planning wasn't too complicated though. She pulled off the working gloves and sat down on a stool at the workbench outside the hottest part of the foundry where she used to use the waiting time for various small jobs. Then she took a scrap of parchment, which had already been used for other notes, In her opinion it could be used again. She rubbed the parchment a bit with a rasp and although this didn't exactly erase previous text, it made it fade. Satisfied with the rasping, she dipped a quill in ink and wrote a list of short points in fatter, bigger letters on top of the former text. The resulting palimpsest was miserable from a professional point of view, and she would certainly not recycle parchment this way for more important notes. But the plan was just for herself and for thing that didn't matter to anybody else. She could as well be economic.

The plan she had made held the following points:

• Meditate a little bit (must try to do it sometimes even without a trainer)
• Draw an idea of a simple small gadget
• Carve the parts of it in wood in order to make a miniature model
• Test if this works, and if not, figure out why
• Interrupt this project once in a while in order to tend to the foundry
  
  This would be enough for now. She could always add more things to the list later on, if there was time for it.

...

[Ornea]

Some would maybe think it hard to meditate in a metalsmithing workshop. But the workshop made Ornea feel safe. It was solid and down to earth, a place for hard work with no nonsense tasks, and it felt like her lingering overgiving issues weren't able to disturb her here. The place smelled of burning coal and wood, metal, some chemicals Lucis had in store for various crafting ends. She had tools to hold on to. The work bench in front of her was sturdy. It was a place to feel strong in, not frail. She thought it was well worth a try to meditate there.

Ornea wasn't going to complicate the meditation with a lot of extra refinements. The important thing with meditation was instead to get it done.

She started by adjusting her position on the stool so it would be maximum straight yet comfortable. Next it was to to let her hands rest on top of her knees with the palms turned up. Finally she looked around at everything in the location. It had once been explained to her that this was important, although she had forgotten why. She applied it anyway.

Once she felt done with the preparations she shut her eyes and focused on feeling her own breath without changing it. She sat this way for an uncertain period of time, counting the breaths, and every time she felt herself starting to lose focus she resumed the counting, starting over from one. This happened a number of times, and soon she had lost track of how many times she had started over.

Every time she caught herself losing count it was like a small awakening right when she became aware and returned to the practice. It repeated, repeated, repeated and repeated, and her whole mind focused increasingly on the repetition, at same time increasingly letting go of other things.

After a while she came to a point where she felt it was time to come out of the meditative state she had entered. She didn't know why she felt this, but she didn't question the feeling, she just followed it, without hesitation. She stopped counting the breaths and started to think of opening her eyes. And then she opened them, and repeated the looking around at everything. She was at Lucis. Slowly she moved a bit on the stool and she got to her feet. The meditation was over.

Ornea didn't know how long time this had taken so she pulled on the gloves again and went to check on the foundry. But it wasn't time for more coal yet. She went back to the work bench, took off the gloves again and started at the second point on her list.

...

[Ornea]

Ornea was by no means a skilled gadgeteer; she had very little knowledge about the things she was going to do now. But as she had been with Edward at a pulley inspection and learnt a great deal about pulleys, she would try to draw and craft a miniature pulley. She knew how those big but fairly simply machines looked and how they worked. This ought to increase her chances at success a bit.

She found a new parchment, empty this time, and so she took the quill and the ink and started to draw. This was a slow procedure as the quill could only hold a limited amount of ink at the time, so she had to draw just one line at the time, or part of a line. But she continued to draw patiently. Several parchments were scrapped due to drawing mistakes. How could it be this hard to get the drawing right? It took a lot more time than she had expected.

When she finally had a drawing she found alright she thought it best to take a break and tend to the foundry again. Gloves on. Check the fire. Take the shovel and add more coal. Back to the work bench. Gloves off. Continue.

The coal shuffling could only be described as boring labor, but all jobs have their sides.

...

[Ornea]

Why had she agreed to try to carve the parts of the training gadget in wood ? Why hadn't she said no to this insanity? Right when Edward had suggested it the carving had seemed like easy case. She had thought it would just be to shape some small pieces of wood a bit, using a knife. How wrong she had been!

There were small pieces of leftover wood she could use for the training. It would just have been thrown away as garbage otherwise. But as soon as she touched the wood she got a splinter in her finger and had to interrupt the carving before it had even started.

It took some time to get rid of the splinter. She found a small instrument that was normally used for miniature metalwork; tweezers. But not it would be used for basic medicine. It was time consuming to find the right place to apply the tweezers, and it was hard to get a good grip on the splinter. After a while it broke and now she had two splinters instead of one, But Ornea tried until she managed to get hold of the two pieces and pull them out. There. She didn't feel like a top class medic exactly, but she had done it. The downside was that she was bleeding a little bit. She hoped it would stop soon.

Next try at the carving wasn't any more successful. She nearly cut her finger instead of the small piece of wood she intended to shape. Ornea's respect for carpenters and carvers was going up by the chime. It had turned out to be harder and more dangerous than she knew to carve some simple little wooden parts. Her attempts ended with something that looked quite different from what the drawing showed. This was obvious, but as Ornea was so optimistic she decided to try to build the gadget as well as she could.

She put the parts together and built a monstrous little miniature of something that could only be identified as a pulley if one was very benevolent. Needless to say that when she tried to equip it with a thin leather cord which was meant to imitate ropes and chains, it just went worse. The small gadget didn't work of course.

Ornea studied her plan and tried to restrain herself from crushing the little abomination at once. The plan said "figure out why it doesn't work". Hah! The answer was easy; bad quality from start to end, bad drawing, bad carving, bad gadgeteering work. Cuckoo, simply!

Clipped litte cuckoo pieces of wood and clipped carving knife, she thought to herself.

But feelings wouldn't get her anywhere. Cooling down again she admitted the truth to herself; she lacked the knowledge and the skill, that was the root to all her mistakes and troubles and the failure of this day's side tasks for training. She still had a mountain of things to learn.

This was why it was so good to do these disappointing attempts in the waiting times at the foundry. She could use the results as fuel when she proceeded to do work she was skilled at.

...

[Ornea]

After throwing the miserable attempt at a miniature pulley gadget into the fire, Ornea pulled on the working gloves again, grabbed the shuffle and added more coal. She felt the heat in the air against her face and against her body. . Ivak, it was hot, and she felt drips of sweat running from her brown and down her cheek. Ornea simply wiped it off. She was used to it, after years of metalsmithing, in Wind Reach and in Lhavit

As the furnace was now hot enough, the metalsmithing process could progress to the melting of the iron. She filled the melting pot with iron bars from Lucis and Lucis material store and pushed the put into the hottest part of the furnace, using a very long-shafted tool that allowed her to work from a distance. There. For a few chimes she stood watching the pot, and felt satisfied that she had carried out this step and the metal would now start to melt.

To melt iron isn’t instantaneous though. A new wait had started and Ornea went back to the work bench outside of the worst heat in order to pass the time, while still keeping an eye on the furnace. She pulled off the metalsmithing work gloves and put them on the work bench.

She decided to plan again. She found one more of those used scraps of parchment, took a rasp to it and rasped lightly on the surface, taking care to just make the text fade a bit but still keep the scrap useful for writing on. After thinking a bit she dipped the quill in ink and made a new palimpsest. She wrote slowly and made only short points. When she was done with it, she put the quill to the side and read the new plan she had made.

Plan: To do
• Practice at the carving on some material that is easier to work with
• Make a new and better drawing; try to use a ruler and compasses this time
• Try to find a used block and tackle somewhere in the workshop
• Dismantle those to investigate the mechanics in detail
• Check on the furnace and the melting iron once in a while
• Additional tasks can happen

Quite a good plan! Ornea put it the upper left corner of the work desk, and with the carving knife in her hand she went to look for materials to carve in. She found it within a few chimes. It was beeswax, or more correctly, the remainders of used wax candles. The stubs had been saved in a basket in order to be recycled. It looked promising, but she was going to make a carving test before she continued.

She picked up one of the bigger stumps and took the knife to it. Slowly and carefully she carved in it with the tip of the knife. The wax seemed far easier to shape than the wood had been, but it would be a lie to say she accomplished anything more than some random patterns. Ornea felt pleased to have found a material to practice on though. Wax seemed like an excellent training material for a beginner carver like her.

She put a bunch of the wax stumps in a metal pot and placed it in the vicinity of the furnace. The wax softened quickly and she fished up the small pieces of candlewick and poured the cleaned wax into a small mold. She put the mold on the floor beside the work desk; the wax would soon cool down and become solid again.

Meanwhile it was time for her to make a new attempt at drawing a miniature pulley. This time she would start from another angle. She put the ruler on a fresh piece of parchment, dipped the quill in ink and drew part of a line. She had to repeat this several times in order to draw the full line. She completed the drawing of this first line by carefully removing the ruler, and after this she sprinkled find sand over the drawing in order to remove surplus ink. This could seem simple, but as she was new at drawing gadget sketches it was challenging enough for her. She waited a little bit and then she blew the sand away. Now she had a pretty nice line, not perfect, but better than her previous attempts.

At this point she put on the metalsmithing work gloves again, and went to check on the melting iron in the furnace. She shuffled in a generous batch of new coal to make sure to maintain the fire and the heat. It wasn’t time to do anything more yet, nor had she expected that. Supervision of the process was part of the job though. Casting iron wasn’t a quick fix.

...

[Ornea]

Edward Lucis came back to check on how the work was going. Ornea reported to him about the iron. She was happy that she had consigned the first attempt at making a miniature pulley to the fire of the furnace. No need to show Edward the mediocre failures she suffered in her self studies in between the steps of the metalsmithing process!

"No problems so far. Everything goes according to plan." She sounded hearty because she was hearty. Her enthusiasm for work was mostly high, because she was enthralled by the interesting crafting at Lucis and Lucis and sincerely wanted to advance.

"Good!" Edward beamed at her. "And what about the training I suggested you do on your own in order to familiarize yourself with drawing, carving, gadgeteering and such? Do you have anything you want to show me? Questions?"

"Not yet. I have started at it a little bit ..." She made a vague gesture to the work bench. "Thought it would be better to go slowly and take care do get every detail right from start. I have started with the drawing."

"Let's have a look at the drawing then!" Edward was already on his way to the work bench, his steps vigorous despite his age, and Ornea followed, pulling off the gloves again as she walked. She put them on the bench and waited for Edward to comment on the beginnings of her drawing. The single line she had drawn, to be correct.

"Well ..." said Edward thoughtfully. "You have drawn a line, and ..."

"I used the ruler" Ornea offered. "I think it can be important to make sure a straight line really is straight. To draw freehand can be great in order to make a note. But it's not good enough when the purpose is to craft a gadget. A drawing for a gadget needs to be exact."

"Yes." Edward turned his gaze to her and watched her for a few silent ticks. "I see. You have learnt a very essential thing about technical drawings. It's not art. Well made gadget drawings can sure look very beautiful and the design of gadgets can be close to art, but a gadget drawing is essentially a work platform, an input that rules the crafting. When you make the drawing, you create the goal. The gadget you make need to meet certain specifications, and these are what you use as input to the drawing. So it's very important, the drawing. "

Ornea nodded. "Yes" she confirmed. "The drawing is essential, as this is the picture that represents the requirements on the gadget and shows how it is meant to function, what parts needs to be crafted, and how they will be assembled to a gadget."

Edward looked at her again. "You seem to have gained some insights. One would believe that you have experimented more than meets the eye." He looked around in the work space, but as Ornea had burnt the mess she had made at the first try there was no trace of her failed experiments.

"I'm a competent metalsmith, so I guess the experience in crafting other things has influenced my ability to think of gadgeteering ..." Ornea shrugged slightly. In order to try to change topic and get some useful tips she pointed at the compasses. "I have seen you use this drawing tool, but I'm not so familiar with it."

The tool had too metal legs, joined at one end, but not fixed. The other ends of the legs had different tips, one of them pointed like a needle, the other equipped with a small piece of a dark material, also with a sharp tip.

"Compasses. It's named compasses. It's used for making perfect circles. As you can see ... the tip that is sharp as a needle is pressed into the parchment or paper like this ...at the point where you want the center of a circle you are going to draw ... and then you adjust the distance to the circles perimeter, like this ... and then you move the writing tip and make the circle." Edward showed all this in practice on a used parchment slip he found, and Ornea watched.

When he was done showing her how the compasses were used, he handed it to her and Ornea repeated the whole procedure. She put the needle-like tip to a parchment slip and fastened the tool there, adjusted the distance to the perimeter, and drew a circle by moving the writing tip of the tool. This way she drew a perfect circle. She was now able to use compasses in her continued attempts at drawing.

...

[Ornea]

“Wait a chime Edward, I’ll just check on the iron ... “ Invigorated by the instruction Edward had given her for how to use the compasses she bounced up from the stool she had been sitting on and pulled on her metalsmith gloves with renewed energy. She went over to the furnace. The iron had become hot and the surface of the bars were glowing red. But it wasn’t molten yet. Her experience told her it would take around two bells to melt it in Lucis coal fueled furnace, maybe even more, depending on how she succeeded with keeping up the heat. It had been faster to melt iron in Wind Reach. It wasn’t clear to Ornea exactly why, but she thought it was due to the magma furnaces being way hotter, as heat was definitely of importance. She thought about this as she once again shuffled in more coal.

When she was done with this she returned to the work desk and pulled off her gloves. Edward was still there. He was studying the line she had drawn. “Not bad for a line made with quill and ink. But you can’t become successful at accurate drawing if you use quill and ink you know. Ink, quills and brushes are good for art, and many use these for writing letters, but when it comes to drawings for gadgets, or for botany and other natural science ends you need to use a metaltip.”

“Metaltip?” Ornea was actually not sure what he meant. She hadn’t been drawing much in the past, freehand metalsmithing for artsy ends had been the lion’s part of her metalsmithing before Lhavit, and although many of the thing she was casting nowadays was used for the basic machinery of the city she was still only competent as metalsmith and totally new to gadgeteering. “I have been wondering how to make the lines as fine and accurate as on your drawings” she confessed. “It’s really hard to get it right with the quill. It only holds a very small amount of ink and I have to dip it in the ink over and over again and draw a small part of the line at the time. And there’s the risk for blotches and smearing ... do you mean there’s other writing tools than the quill ?”

“Yes. There’s metaltips. Most people don’t know anything about it of course. But it’s fairly simple. A metaltip is exactly what it sounds like. A stick of metal with a fine tip. Some metals make traces when they are applied to parchment or paper, so they can be used to draw and write with. Lead is the metal most commonly used for metaltips.”

He pulled out a small metalstick from a pocket of the leather work apron he was wearing and showed it to Ornea. “It’s just a stick of lead. It has fine point ... “ He handed the metaltip to Ornea.

She took the tool and examined it. As she ran her fingers over it she felt the smooth and cold surface. The pointed tip was sharp against her fingertip. “It’s thin” she said. “It seems hard to hold it properly ...” She wanted to investigate how it was to write with the metaltip, so she tried to write a line in a corner of the parchment she had drawn the ink line on. She put the tip of the stick to the parchment and moved it carefully over the surface. At first she pressed a little bit too hard and the metaltip made a small hole. Ouch! She continued, with less pressure now. It felt a bit weird, but she drew a proper line. It was fine and neat, but it was grey, not black as the ink.

“The line is very accurate” she observed. “But it’s pretty hard to hold the stick, it’s so thin.”

Edward smiled. “That’s my spare metaltip. When I use a metaltip I place it in a holder ...”

He pulled out a new item from his pocket. Ornea looked at it and Edward explained it to her; it was a tube of wood, carved in two halves, hollowed out in the inside so the metaltip could be placed there, held together at the ends with small pieces of metal wire and wrapped with leader bands in between those. It was a wooden holder for a metaltip.

“I’m not drawing anything today, so you can borrow mine and get one of your own later”. The old man’s tone shifted and it was clear that he was now turning his focus to other things and would leave her to her own devices. Ornea thanked him for his advice and for the loan of the tool. As always when she had spoken with Edward she felt uplifted and eager to continue with her tasks. Smiling, she looked after him, but only briefly. She had a new metaltip to test in practice.

...

[Ornea]

She continued with the drawing for a while. But then it was time to cast the bolts. She poured the molten iron into mold after mold. This didn't take so long time. The pouring of the metal was maybe what most people would think of as the lion's part of the metalsmith job, but it was in fact just one part of it and it was over quickly.

She would coat the bolts with tin next day. For now she left them to cool down. It was time for the noon rest and she took off the gloves and the apron and went out to have lunch.

...