Not sure what happened to this poor thing

This is the stage from a smith, Beck and Beck Best microscope. I’m not sure what happened to the poor thing! The entire microscope (not just the stage) is covered in what appears to dirt and mould. However, it is not just dirt, it appears to be varnish encrusted with dirt and mould.

The substance is rock hard and takes a great deal of work to remove. I think the microscope was stored somewhere without a box, varnish or something similar has been spilled on it and dirt has fallen into the still-wet coating. At least that’s what it looks like. I have finished restoring most of the microscope, just the stage left to do.

I shall post a picture of the microscope when it is completed. I need to get on, I have two telecopes and two oher microscopes to do..

New website, new logo!

Logo

Brass and Glass has a new snazzy website with a new snazzy logo. I’m very pleased with it, I think it looks a bit smarter and it feels more personalized and special now.

My husband is the bearer of a coat of arms (technically his father is the current bearer, but let’s not split hairs). The Thoyts coat of arms consists of gold stars (mullets) on an azure background. In heraldry, the stars originally represented a knight’s spurs although it isn’t always the case. The symbol for the planet Venus is also present and it is unclear what meaning this has, if indeed it has any meaning at all. The meanings of heraldic symbols can be bad puns, their meanings can be lost in time or sometimes they are only there because they look good. The crest is a heath-cock (grouse) rising with the Venus symbol on its chest.

Through marriage the Thoyts family combined their coat of arms with that of the Burfoot family, and I have loosely based my logo on this. My family does not have a coat of arms because I come from a long line of non-conformist peasants, so for my contribution to the new coat of arms I substituted the Burfoot stars for microscopes while keeping the black background. I’m sure the Burfoots would be horrified.

Click on the thumbnails below to see the progression of the Coat of Arms

I came, I saw, I conquered

Never, in the history of microscopes has a microscope given me so much trouble. I don’t know why but this piece of a Reichert just did not want to be lacquered. I did it again and again and again. It ran, it dripped, it missed bits. I tried using cloths, pads, brushes, foam, I tried hot, warm and cold metal. The thing was out to get me.

It happens sometimes, you just have a bad day, but the good thing about lacquering microscopes is that if you mess it up you can just take the lacquer off and redo it. Not that that is much comfort on the third day of trying having used up 100 mls of lacquer.

I got there in the end. The Reichert (whose name is Ernie) is now my friend again. Now for the trickier bits.

Interesting mechanism inside the little brown Merz

The Merz has an interesting design, and not one I have seen before. Most microscopes of this age and style have a solid round  bar through which a triangular bar passes. The triangular bar has a screw at one end and a spring at the other and it’s a very effective, simple fine focus mechanism.

The Merz has a rather different set up – it also has a triangular block with a screw at one end and a spring at the other, but instead of passing through a round bar, the triangular block passes through another triangular piece. The outer triangle is constructed from pieces of flat brass which have been joined together by brazing – this might explain why Merz painted these parts rather than lacquering them I think. Using brazed pieces of brass would have saved a lot of wastage and money and it would easily have been strong enough.

A “typical” round Baker fine focus block on the left, the Merz brazed, triangular fine focus mechanism on the right.

Travel could only have occurred in a small area. The solid triangular bar has a cut out area and a small bar is inserted through the corner of the brazed piece which acts as a stop. The pictures make it much easier to understand.

 

Making paint

Pb or not Pb? that is the question. Pb is the chemical symbol for lead, today I shall be talking about lead. Hilarious aren’t I? ( please don’t answer that).

I have a new baby to work on.  You can see below that it has a patch of corrosion on the foot which has to be treated before if spreads. I shall treat it with a gentle rust remover, sand the area and prime before painting. Here’s the tricky bit – I like to use ingredients and techniques that are as authentic as possible. I am pretty sure that the original maker would have used a lead oxide primer. I can’t buy lead oxide primer and although I can buy lead oxide powder, it is very expensive and it’s not a clever thing to be working with. Also, the chances of me ingesting some are quite high, because I tend to lick things if I don’t have a damp cloth to hand.  I shall be using a commercially available non-ferrous metals primer instead, it won’t show underneath the paint anyway. Interestingly, I can see brush marks in the original paintwork so they weren’t being all that fussy.

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I shall be starting on it as soon as some brown paint pigments arrive from my chums at Ingilby. I need to mix my own paint for this one. For a bog standard black and chrome 1950s – 1970’s microscope I tend to use black enamel paint. either Japlac or a reasonably high temperature coach enamel, sometimes with lacquer on top, sometimes not. This baby is special, it is also much older than 1950 and painted brown not black.  Below is my paint mixing kit: pigments, linseed oil, a large ground glass sheet and a muller. Hopefully the brown pigments will arrive tomorrow.

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Brass stamp

My stamp arrived yesterday, it fits into my fly press and allows me to stamp my mark onto any brass items I make. I’m very pleased with it. It was made by two lovely chaps at Chalco Stamp and Die engraving in Wellingborough and looks so professional.

I can’t wait to use it on something. I plan to make a bullseye condenser in the next few weeks. A traditional feel for a contemporary item. Splendid.

Chalco can be found at their website here; chalco dies

I have been awarded a grant!

I am overjoyed and very honoured to have been granted an award by the Gane Trust, a charitable trust which gives grants and awards to people involved in crafts, design, social welfare and the arts.  I have received a grant which will enable me to buy more hand files for producing small hand crafted brass items and spare parts.

Crofton Gane was a Quaker and a furniture maker who took great interest in craftsmen, he went to great lengths to encourage craftspeople, both young and old to develop their skills.

From the Gane Trust website:

In 1968 a fellow Quaker wrote “Crofton Gane’s main concern was that men should enjoy their work and find fulfilment in it. All his activities, spread over his long life, arose from his faith in man’s inherent dignity as a maker. He believed that man would come through because God is in him. He believed, therefore, in tomorrow. Beauty of form and excellence of craftsmanship were his delight.”

He was fascinated by fresh ideas and quick to give the word of encouragement, continually writing to people who were undertaking some creative service. To everything that was making a “contribution” (to use his favourite word) he was willing to give his great energy, his thought and his money.

I certainly feel encouraged, I hope Crofton Gane would have been pleased with my work if he could see it. I’m off to write a thank you letter now.

Home

 

It works!

So here we have it , black walnut dye in alcohol. It came out quite pale so I had to evaporate off the alcohol and resuspended in a smaller volume. I started with 100mls and ended up with about 5mls but it’s the colour I wanted. Tomorrow I shall add a few drops to some lacquer and job done!

Walnut adventures continued

The walnut hulls in alcohol have been on the magnetic stirrer for about 6 hours with intermittent heat. I’m not terribly impressed with the depth of colour. It looks okay unfiltered on paper but I am not convinced it will be dark enough once it is filtered. We shall see. I’ll give it until the end of the day before I filter.

Sadly , my magnetic stirrer heating element is not thermostatically controlled so I can’t leave it on the heat unattended. I have to keep an eye on it. Makes for a rather boring day. I may concentrate it down after filtering. ideally it will be dark enough that I can just add a few drops to my usual lacquers to tone them down when necessary. I hope it’s worth it. I had high hopes.

Very impressed

I’m still waiting for my walnut hulls to arrive (damn you bank holiday) but I thought I’d try mixing some alcohol dyed with coffee in with some lacquer while I wait. I am NOT going to use coffee in microscope lacquer but it does give me an indication of the kind of colour I might achieve when the walnut arrives. Coffee in the lacquer gives exactly the colour I want. Hurry up Post-lady! Bring me my walnut!

Walnut, yes!

Cloth is either made from plant material (cottons, flax) or animal materials (wool, silk, leather). When dying these materials you need mordants – additives that help the colour grab on to the material and set it in place. It’s a complex art and experts are known as Master Dyers for good reason. The colour you get depends on pH and the type of mordant used. Common mordants are alum, iron sulphate, copper sulphate, tin chloride and tannic acid.  A dye may be brown with one mordant but green when used with a different mordant, and the type of fabric used also effects the colour. There’s a lot of information out there about using natural dyes on both wood and textiles but getting the colours right on metal lacquer is rather different.

Natural dyes are usually used in water and can react very differently in an alcohol and shellac mixture. Some simply won’t work (onion skins for instance) and others colour the solvent incompletely, or float to the surface of the lacquer and wash off (wood dyes are particularly bad for this, even those that are sold as alcohol soluble). Bismarck brown, a common Victorian stain, produces a brown/red colour when used as a wood stain but is scarlet when used in lacquer. It doesn’t adhere well either…

Brass contains copper and zinc but when you restore an old microscope you never know quite how much of each you are dealing with. Even though you are not really dying the metal, your lacquer sits on top of the metal, the zinc and copper content of the brass can still alter the colour of the lacquer. It can be tricky to know what will happen.  You might apply a lacquer that appears to be a rich gold on a test piece of brass, but when applied to the antique microscope it comes out a dull yellow. It’s a pain. I have one lacquer which when it first goes on has a slight green tinge to it (possibly a reaction with copper) but after a week or so the green tinge dissipates and it turns yellow again. I haven’t quite figured this out but I think the green copper complex is unstable. It degrades in daylight. It only happens on old brass, not new brass – just to add another layer of mystery.

Why bother, you ask? Why not buy a can of spray on nitrocellulose lacquer?

Why? because I like things to be done properly and I don’t want every microscope I restore to look exactly the same as the previous one. Different makers used different colours. Different lacquer batches from the same maker were different colours. Lacquer colours changed with fashion. Some early Watson microscopes used a deep orange gold lacquer, later ones were very pale. There was a lot of variation and considerable beauty. I like to restore things using the same ingredients as were used originally. If you don’t do that then you are not restoring anything, you are doing a bodge job. You wouldn’t use acrylic paint on the Mona Lisa would you? (God forbid she ever gets damaged). You might use a brush with a plastic handle, or maybe artificial bristles (if you can make the same brush strokes) but you wouldn’t use modern paints. Besides, it’s fun. Research is fun and experimentation is fun.

‘No synthetic dye has the lustre, that under-glow of rich colour, that delicious aromatic smell, that soft light and shadow that gives so much pleasure to the eye. These colours are alive.’ Violetta Thurston

As I have already said, not all dyes are created equal. Some are particularly wonderful. Dyes such as turmeric are known as substantive dyes, they don’t need mordants to adhere to fabric and they are not too temperamental in lacquer. In fact they are very, very reliable. Turmeric is the basis for almost every lacquer I make and it never fails to be yellow. Obviously, being a natural product there is some variation in the intensity of the yellow but it is always, without fail, yellow.

Today I had a small breakthrough, I have a tiny piece of a microscope which I repaired for a customer. The piece is repaired but the repair damaged the lacquer so I have to colour match and re-lacquer. This lacquer is a smoky gold colour. Warm gold with a tiny hint of brown. I have tried all sorts of ways to get browns and whilst I have had some success, I have not yet found a reliable source of brown which I can mix with other dyes. There are modern dyes, but I want to stick with products which were commonly used in the Victorian era.

I was browsing textile dying websites for inspiration when I stumbled across black walnut hulls. Walnut! Of course! They used to make ink for pens from walnut hulls. It was a VERY common ingredient in the Victorian era. I would be amazed if they didn’t use it. I have some water based walnut hull ink in the cupboard and it is a lovely nutty brown. A little research and I discovered that walnut is also a substantive dye that is brown in both alcohol and water. I’m waiting for walnut hulls to arrive from eBay. I am very keen to test it out. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before!

 

walnut

Here we go…

Here is the Baker microscope with the bent pinion all taken apart. Since taking the photo I have cleaned it, sanded some areas and primed them ready for painting. Tomorrow I shall blacken the stage and do some more sanding and painting. I shall repeat this process about 10 times. It will be worth it in the end.

disassembled Baker

Perfectionism

Today I have re-lacquered the same piece three times. The first time I did it it came out too orange. I stripped off the lacquer, diluted it and tried again. The colour was better but after staring at it for some time I decided it was still not quite right for the era.

I stripped one piece and I made a further dilution of my lacquer then did a rough and ready re-lacquering of a test area. The colour is better now but I shall have to do the piece properly next week. I am getting impatient and making mistakes now. It’s better to wait.

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Re-lacquering a piece numerous times seems to be par for the course. I seek perfection in colour, in shininess and in all round wow factor. No point lacquering a piece absolutely beautifully but in the wrong shade of yellow. I have to feel proud when I have finished. I never feel relaxed if I know there is an error, or the colour isn’t quite right. I don’t suppose this is a bad thing.

 

Perfection! 

A small two tone Baker microscope appeared on eBay some years ago and I was quite taken with its beauty so when I happened across a very badly damaged Baker in need of re-lacquering I decided to recreate the two tone look.

This little chap has been something of an experimental piece as I have tested various brown and orange lacquers out on it. I am finally happy with it. I just have two small pieces drying and I can reassemble it properly. The slideshow below shows the microscope before and after restoration.

My workshop

Today I have been tidying my workshop, it might look a bit of a mess still but I have removed a whole car-boot load of old boxes, used nitrile gloves and bits of emery paper today. The room is looking much tidier even if the worktops themselves still need some work. I shall finish tidying tomorrow – I need to use the milling machine so there is no escape!

workshop

I am still not entirely happy with the little Baker microscope in the foreground of the picture, the brown lacquer comes out far too dark after it has been heated. I am making a new, much paler batch at this moment.  I want a muted earthy tone – not dark chocolate. I should have pictures to post at the weekend.

Different lacquer colours

By varying the amounts of various ingredients, such as Dragon’s Blood, various lacquer colours can be achieved. Below is a picture showing three different batches of lacquer I have made applied to microscope parts.

I am about to make up a fresh batch of yellow as I have a piece to lacquer for a customer, I have some leftover yellow lacquer but I don’t want to risk using it. The lacquer ingredients are dissolved in pure ethanol, over time the ethanol takes up water and water is death to lacquer. Any water in your lacquer and you will get cloudiness and a nasty finish. It’s less trouble to make up fresh.

lacquer colours
Yellow, brown and gold lacquer

 

The lacquering line

Lacquer drying

Not something you see every day -my lacquering washing line. It’s important not to touch the lacquer after it is applied. It needs to dry for several days before being cooked. This re-purposed Ikea wardrobe makes a fine drying cupboard. The wardrobe doors are a good cat deterrent too. Nothing worse than cat hair in the lacquer. I wonder how Victorian microscope makers kept their cats at bay?

I use stiff flexible lubricant hosing and crocodile clips to hold the work while I lacquer it. Once lacquering is complete I can bend the hose and hang it up in the wardrobe. Wire also works but the piece being lacquered can sometimes flop around too much, also wire is not unsuitable for tiny pieces like screws. 

Brown lacquer

Today, I have been working with an unusual brown lacquer. Brown lacquers were not used a great deal, but it is good to have finally perfected one for those rare occasions when a brown lacquer is called for.  The lacquer uses garnet shellac and is somewhat more tricky to apply than any of my yellow or gold lacquers. It is a fairly muted brown and needs to be applied in a slightly thicker layer than usual. Also, it is a damp, cold, dull day and lacquers are much easier to apply when there is bright light and low humidity.

It’s looking good, I am eager to see what it looks like once it has dried and has been cooked.

garnet shellac lacquer
Brown lacquer applied to microscope limb