Drawing Copper Wire and Rolling Sheet by Hand Before the Rolling Mill

Copper Before the Mill

Every still you have ever stood beside began as a lump of copper and a man stubborn enough to beat it into shape. Reader, you are an alchemist at your own apparatus, so you should know what the metal under your hand has been through, and what the men who worked it went through.

In my grandfather's day a New Hampshire man could dig iron out of a bog, smelt it and hammer it, but by the law of England he could not roll it into plate. The Iron Act of 1750, passed under King George the Second, grandfather of the George we threw out, forbade the colonies to build any new slitting mill, plating forge or steel furnace. The Crown wanted us digging the ore and buying the finished goods back from Birmingham at a fat profit. It was like letting a man court a girl but forbidding him the parlor.

Copper was worse off still. Nearly every sheet of it in this country came over in the hold of a ship, and the buyer paid the Englishman, the shipper, the Boston merchant and the peddler before it ever reached a Pittsfield bench. Then in 1801 Paul Revere, the very silversmith who rode out to Lexington, opened the first successful copper rolling mill in America at Canton, Massachusetts. His rolled sheet covered the dome of the State House in Boston, and in 1803 it went onto the bottom of the frigate Constitution. Revere rode all night to warn of the British and then spent the rest of his life rolling copper for the Navy, which proves a patriot will do anything to get out of farming.

Canton is a long way from the Suncook, though, and rolled sheet came at a rolled price. A country smith in the 1860s got his copper wherever he could: cake copper by the pound, old kettles bought off widows, worn ship sheathing hauled up from the Portsmouth yards, and lately the native copper of Lake Superior. Up on the Keweenaw in Michigan the copper comes out of the earth already copper, with no smelting needed. In 1857 the miners at the Minesota Mine uncovered a single mass of near-pure copper weighing about five hundred tons, and they spent months chiseling it into pieces small enough to haul.

Then came the war, and copper went to the guns. Every percussion cap was a little copper cup, and the twelve-pound Napoleon field gun was cast of bronze, which is copper with a dash of tin. The price climbed like a cat up a curtain. In the South it was worse. The Confederacy ran so short that its agents went about collecting the stills of whiskey makers and turpentine men to melt down for caps, so that war was lost twice, once on the field and once in the jug. A Yankee shop that wanted sheet for a pot or tube for a worm had to make its own out of whatever copper it could beg, buy or pry off a barn roof.

Peddlers, Deputies, and the Draw Plate

Not long ago a Concord peddler came rattling up Route 28 with a wagon of rolled sheet, clean as new butter, and asked a price I would sooner pull my own molars with a doorknob and a mule than pay. I declined. He called me a backwoods hammer-monkey, spat on my step, and then wandered round back to see what a hammer-monkey's copper looked like. That put him one long stride inside the reach of Barnaby, my black bear. Barnaby does not charge like a dog. He rolls in sideways like a fallen hayrick, and he took the man's coattail, the seat of his good wool breeches and a fair portion of what was under them. I stitched the fellow on my tooth-pulling chair, eleven stitches in waxed linen, and charged him for neither thread nor whiskey. He sat his wagon seat like a hen on a hot griddle for a fortnight.

The first time the sheriff's men came poking around Fort Wilkins, a young deputy found my wire-drawing plate on the bench. It is a slab of hardened steel full of tapered holes running from large to small, and he decided it was a counterfeiter's die. They carried it all the way to Concord as evidence. Before the magistrate I asked for a bit of copper rod and a pair of tongs, filed a point, greased it with candle tallow, and drew that rod through hole after hole while the clerk timed me on his watch, until the wire was fine enough to floss a magistrate's teeth. They gave the plate back with an apology that cost them nothing. If you strike a large cent with a punch, you will see the copper spread at the rim like pancake batter on a griddle. Keep that in mind, because the whole art of a copper shop rests on it. Copper moves.

Lessons Written in Scars

Nobody in the valley moves copper better than Master Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. He has a scar through his left eyebrow like a plowed furrow. At nineteen, drawing a rod about as thick as your little finger for a run of rivets, he skipped his anneals and forced the metal through eighteen holes on stubbornness alone. At the nineteenth it snapped at the plate, and the loose end whipped back like a coachman's lash and opened his brow to the bone. The broken coil still hangs over his shop door. As he tells every apprentice who asks about it, 'it's the cheapest lesson I ever bought.'

Silas's grandfather once bought a wagonload of worn copper calico-printing rollers from the Cocheco print works at Dover, which had been engraved all over with flowers and vines. He cut them open and flattened them for pot stock. Most of the engraving beat out, but in one pot, if you hold a candle inside at just the right slant, you can still see a faint pattern of roses running round the belly. Another time Silas planished a pot for a Sanbornton man so bright that the man's wife found her first gray hairs in it and came after Silas with a rolling pin. He did not dull the pot. He sold her a lid. And once an apprentice greased the draw bench with bacon fat from his dinner pail. While the shop stood empty Barnaby broke in at the window, licked the bench clean to the grain, and was found sitting in the snow with forty feet of half-drawn wire in his teeth, drawn finer than the apprentice had ever managed.

From Slab to Sheet

Here is the method as we practice it at Fort Wilkins. Melt your cake or scrap copper in a clay crucible and pour it into an iron mold to make a thick slab. Copper melts at about nineteen hundred and eighty-four degrees by the Fahrenheit glass, so you need a good charcoal fire and a strong bellows boy. The mold must also be dry, because molten copper hitting a wet mold spits like a cornered cat.

Take the slab to the anvil and hammer from the middle outward, turning as you go, so the metal spreads evenly and grows wider and thinner. Here is the great secret: the more you hammer copper, the harder and stiffer it gets. That is work-hardening, and if you carry on too long without relief the edges will crack like a dry biscuit. So you anneal. Bring the sheet back to a dull red, judging the colour in a shaded corner and never in sunlight, and then you may quench it in the water tub. Steel quenched goes hard, but copper quenched stays soft, and the plunge cracks off much of the black scale besides. Do not overheat it, though. Copper cooked too hot grows a coarse grain, and afterward the surface comes up pebbly like orange peel.

Clean off the scale in a pickle. Some shops use a weak bath of oil of vitriol in water. Always pour the acid into the water and never the water into the acid. Plain vinegar and salt is slower but kinder to the eyes. Hammer, anneal, pickle and hammer again until you have the thickness you want. Coppersmiths judge sheet by its weight in ounces to the square foot: sixteen-ounce is thin roofing, twenty-ounce makes a sturdy vessel wall, and anything heavier is for a pot that must stand a lifetime of fire. Once the pot or helmet has been raised over the stakes, planish it with light, overlapping blows of a polished hammer on a polished stake. This smooths the dents left by raising and stiffens the wall at the same time.

Drawing Wire and Coiling the Worm

For rivets, bails and lacing, you draw wire. Hammer a rod round, file a long point on one end, smear it with tallow or beeswax, and push the point through the first hole that is a hair smaller than the rod. Grip it in the draw tongs, brace the plate against the bench stops and pull with your whole back. Go down hole by hole and anneal every few holes. Keep the holes clean and the grease fresh, because a dirty hole scores the wire, and the wire will break at the score.

The worm is the coiled pipe that sits in cold water and turns hot spirit vapour back into liquid. In these hills it starts as flat sheet. Cut a long strip as wide as the pipe's girth plus a little for the seam, lay it in a grooved swage block, and drive it round an iron mandrel with a mallet a foot at a time until the edges meet. Braze the seam with borax flux and spelter or silver solder, heating it until the solder runs into the joint like water into a crack. Never use lead solder anywhere the spirit touches. You may true the tube once over a mandrel through a die. Then pack it tight with sand that has been dried bone-dry in a pan over the fire. One of Silas's apprentices packed damp riverbank sand, plugged both ends and put the torch to the first bend. The steam drove a plug across the shop like a musket ball and shot the clay pipe out of a Barnstead farmer's mouth. Some old shops bent their pipe full of molten lead, and I will not allow it here, because lead hides in the seams and comes out in the drink.

With dry sand, a plug in each end and an anneal, wrap the tube slowly round a log or wooden drum, warming it as you go. Pour out the sand, rinse the tube and blow through it to be sure it is open end to end. Then test it under water with a little breath pressure, because a pinhole leaks vapour, and vapour near a fire is how still-houses burn down. Copper all the way through matters because the vapour carries sulphur stinks and the copper takes them up, in the worm as well as the pot head. Keep the inside clean and bright after every run.

Ash, Oak, and the Blue Flame

Mr. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether old-timers really threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg 'to clean out bad heads.' Hardwood ash is potash, the stuff of lye. Your grandmother boils fat with it to make soap, and it will take the skin off your knuckles and blind you if it splashes. A man who puts it in his doubler is cooking soap. No ash and no trick in any keg will do the separating your cuts are meant to do. Oak shavings will give up some colour, tannin and woody flavour, the same way apples or peaches in the doubler give flavour. But flavour is not cleaning. I learned my respect for lye when Barnaby swallowed a bar of soap off a washerwoman's line and blew rainbow bubbles out of both ends for three days, while the stagecoach passengers cheered.

Then there is the blue-flame test. Good ethanol burns pale blue, and so does methanol, whose flame is so faint in daylight you can scarcely see it. A spoonful of deadly heads burns just as blue as a spoonful of good hearts, and the colour of the flame will not reliably tell you about lead either. Judging spirit that way is like judging a parson by his hat.

No copper, however fine, will make your cuts for you. The foreshots and heads come first, and they carry the methanol and harsh solvents that blind and kill. Set them aside, discard them, and never drink them or give them away. Catch the run in many small numbered jars, judge each one by nose, keep the hearts and set the oily tails aside. Keep the fire low and steady, keep the still-house aired, and keep open flame away from any leak. Mind the law as well: the government forbids distilling spirit to drink without a federal permit, and all of this is offered for history and education only. A sheet of copper is only a lump of patience that has been hit enough times, and that goes for men too.