The Tinsmith's Quarrel: Thin Sheet Copper and Soft Solder on a Still

Every man who keeps a copper vessel over a fire is a natural philosopher, whether he owns it or not. His pot is his crucible and his worm is his retort. Each run is an experiment in heat and vapour, and the cuts are where he takes his readings. An experimenter is only as honest as his apparatus, though, and this is the story of how I learned that from a tinsmith, a solder seam and a bear named Barnaby. Barnaby is asleep on the woodpile as I write, like a bishop on a featherbed, and I have no wish to wake him.

Where a New Hampshire Stillmaker Finds His Copper

It does not come from the ground under Pittsfield. I have dug two wells and a privy pit here, and buried one revenue man's hat out back, and all I ever found was granite, more granite and a Methodist button. Most of our copper now comes out of the Lake Superior country in Michigan. There it lies in great lumps of native metal so pure that the miners cut it with chisels like cold cheese, and some masses weigh more than a team of oxen. Men have been tearing it from those hills since the forties. Nearer home are the Ely mines at Vershire in Vermont, a stinking pit full of smelter smoke where men cough copper and spit green.

From the mine the metal goes to the rolling mills. The greatest of these near Boston is the Revere works at Canton, Massachusetts. Yes, that is the same Paul Revere who rode about shouting at farmers in the night. In 1801 he set up the first proper mill in this country for rolling sheet copper, and his sheet went onto the bottom of the frigate Constitution and the dome of the State House in Boston.

The process is worth any experimenter's study. Copper is cast into cakes, heated red and passed through great iron rolls turned by water wheels, which squeeze it thinner and thinner the way a miser squeezes a cent. Copper grows hard and cranky as it is worked, so between passes it is heated again to soften it. That is annealing. Then it is sheared square and sold by its weight to the square foot. Mark that well. Sixteen-ounce copper weighs one pound to the square foot and is about two hundredths of an inch thick. Heavier sheet is thicker, and thicker is what you want under a fire. Thin sheet in a still bottom is like a thin sole on a boot in mud season: it may get you to the barn, but it will not get you to church.

The Long and Thieving Road from Boston

The war has made copper dear. Every cartridge case, every brass fitting and every ship's bolt for Mr. Lincoln's navy eats copper, and the price went up like a startled pheasant. A stillmaker in Merrimack County pays near half a dollar a pound or worse. If he buys from a middleman, he pays that middleman's rum bill on top of it.

There is talk of a railroad up the Suncook Valley, but you cannot ship copper on talk. The sheet leaves Boston by rail, passes Lowell and Nashua and rides the cars to Concord. There it goes onto a wagon and is jolted up the turnpike through Epsom, over ruts deep enough to drown a calf in April. Teamster, tavern keeper, hostler and a second teamster all handle it on the way, and a crate passes through more crooked hands than the collection plate at a horse auction.

Hezekiah Tubbs and the Twenty-Ounce Lie

Hezekiah Tubbs kept a squat tin shop up the road toward Barnstead that smelled of rosin and lies. He sold tin cups, lanterns and milk pans over the counter. Under it he kept sheet copper, bought cheap off the Concord wagons and sold dear to men who could not wait three weeks for Boston. The winter copper went to the moon, I needed sheet for a new pot bottom. Tubbs swore on his mother's grave (she was alive in Northwood at the time) that his sheet was twenty-ounce copper, heavy as a church bell. He charged me a war price on top of the war price and called it patriotism.

I should have known. When I dropped the sheet on my shop floor it did not ring with a deep note. It went 'plink' like a cheap spoon. But I was in a hurry, and Tubbs could talk a hen out of her eggs and then sell her the shells. Worse, I had no time to braze the bottom properly, so I let Tubbs's boy seam it with soft solder. That is tin and lead, the same stuff you mend a milk pan with, and it melts at a few hundred degrees. Soft solder on a fire-side seam is like a deacon's promise at a barn dance: it holds fine until things get warm.

The Seam That Wept Above the Fire

One February night I had a pot of fermented rye wash on a low, patient fire. The cap was pasted down with rye flour paste and the first drops were coming. Then I heard a thin whistle like a teakettle with a cold. I put my nose down and smelled hot spirit coming out of the side seam, low on the pot, right above the firebox. The solder was weeping, and little silver beads rolled down the copper like sweat on a sinner's lip.

This is the observation every experimenter must burn into his memory: spirit vapour is heavier than air. It does not rise politely like chimney smoke. It sinks and crawls along the floor toward your fire like a cat to the cream. I saw a pale blue flicker lick out from under the firebox door, and my bowels went cold as the Suncook in March. I raked the fire out the back door into the snow, threw wet grain sacks over the coals and flung the door wide. Only when no flame was within ten feet did I slap a fat wad of rye paste over the seam. I lost the run, but I kept the building, my eyebrows and my life.

The next morning I cut a square foot from the leftover sheet and carried it to the post office scale. Tubbs's twenty-ounce copper weighed fourteen ounces on Uncle Sam's honest brass. When he came to collect the balance of his bill, I paid him in coin struck at my own anvil, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and weighed as honestly as he weighed his copper. Every dollar came in about six cents shy. Then he went around the back of the still-house looking for the rest of my money and stepped over Barnaby's chain. A bear woken in February has the temper of a man woken by his creditor. Barnaby took the seat of Tubbs's trousers, a fair share of what was underneath and the last of the man's dignity, which was the thinnest gauge of all. I sewed him up at my dentist's chair with waxed thread, eleven stitches, and he walked home to Barnstead sideways for a fortnight. After that I bought straight off the Boston wagons and weighed every sheet myself.

Lessons from Hacksaw McAllister's Bench

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister hammers copper at the Fort Wilkins foundry, and his people have beaten metal for generations. His rule is to weigh every sheet: never trust the stamp, and never trust the man. His father hung a steelyard from the main beam of the shop. One spring a Boston drummer swore his wagonload was sixteen-ounce sheet, and the cut square foot balanced at thirteen ounces. The old man stacked the whole lot on the drummer's head and walked him out into a cold April rain. In his son's telling he said only: “You carried it up here, you can carry it back.”

On joints Silas speaks plainly. Soft solder will do for a lantern or a cup that never sees a fire, but never for a fire-side seam, and lead has no business touching anything a man drinks. A proper kettle seam is cramped and brazed. You shear teeth along one edge like a comb, lay them over and under the other edge so they lock like fingers in prayer, hammer the joint tight, and flow in spelter (hard solder of the brass kind) with borax for flux. That joint will stand a red fire for ten years, while soft solder will stand it for ten weeks if you pray. Silas once took a scraper to a bright peddler's still in Gilmanton and found grey solder under a hair of gold: the seams had been painted with bronze powder stirred into varnish. Painting soft solder bronze is like rouging a corpse. It fools the congregation, not the undertaker.

The wagon road has cheated Silas as well. A crate of rolled sheet from Boston spent a night outside a Hooksett tavern while the teamster slept off his drink in the hayloft. When it was pried open in the shop yard, it held rusty roofing tin and a fat, angry white gander. The copper never came back. The goose, named Hooksett, guarded the yard for eleven years.

When Silas was fourteen, he hammered a still-cap dome without ever returning it to the fire, and it split across like a pie crust. His grandfather made him anneal every broken piece to a dull red through the night until each was soft as a glove, then told him: “Now you know what a sheet feels like when it needs a rest. Feel it in your hammer hand.”

The Experiment of the Run

What follows is history and education. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States.

An honest pot has heavy sheet on the bottom, where the fire bites, and lighter sheet only up the sides. Anneal the dome every few courses, and cramp and braze every seam. Rivet where the arm meets the cap if you like, but braze over the rivets too. Then fill the pot with water, heat it and walk around it with a candle held well back, looking for weeps. Copper sweetens the spirit because it scrubs out the sulphur stinks of rotten egg and boiled cabbage. Those stinks travel in the vapour, so the copper in the cap, swan neck and arm does most of the scrubbing.

For the old Pittsfield mash, scald a bushel of rye meal in a tub and stir it hard. Let it cool to blood warm, then stir in a good peck of malted barley, which turns the starch to sugar. Add yeast, cover the tub and keep it warm. In four to six days it goes quiet and sour-sweet, a wash no stronger than hard cider. Keep a door open while it works, because a working tub breathes out a gas that will kill a man in a closed cellar. Strain the wash, fill the pot no more than two-thirds full, paste every joint with rye flour and water, and bring the fire up slowly.

The cuts are your readings. The foreshots smell like a glue pot and carry the wood alcohol that blinds and kills, so throw them all away, and more when in doubt. The heads are harsh and solvent-smelling; set them aside. The hearts are sweet and smell of grain and honey; catch them in small jars and smell every one. The tails are oily and smell of wet dog; save them for another run. Keep the firebox away from the jar and the worm's mouth, keep sand and wet sacks by the door, and never leave a running still. I once saw a Loudon still-house burn so fast that its owner came out with his boots on fire.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Spoon of Fire

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Wood ash leached with water gives lye. Lye neutralizes a little sourness, but it makes the keg foam and does nothing about the wood alcohol, which leaves the still at the front of the run. A cooper in Epsom showed me that you can blow bubbles through a hand-long stick of red oak, because its pores are open. Its shavings add tannin, colour and the taste of a fence rail, but they do not clean. The thump keg makes the spirit stronger, but it is no filter. The only cure for bad heads is honest cuts.

As for the blue-flame burn test, I strike it down in three blows. First, wood alcohol burns with a pale blue flame of its own. Second, a flame proves only that a spirit is strong enough to burn, not how it was cut or soldered. Third, the only true test is good copper, hard joints, clean cuts and a careful nose. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.