kd1yt
Cast Iron
- Joined
- Dec 6, 2013
- Location
- Vermont, USA
I find myself wondering often how it was that skilled metallurgists of 100 + years ago - who frequently achieved pretty impressive results - managed to do it so effectively prior to all of the modern technologies and techniques that we now have to so precisely analyze and assay ingredients, molecular-level alloy structures, etc.- I'm sure empirical experience showed that certain ores from certain locations had specific tendencies... but I am still amazed because there must have become the need to work with raw materials from many sources and still achieve repeatable results.
I am partly interested due to strong general fascination and admiration about how those who came before us did so much with what we would now consider very little to work with - and partly due to personal family heritage- my ancestors had been deeply and successfully involved in the steel industry in Wales and were originally brought to the USA in approximately the 1840s as consultants to help this country come up with more durable metallurgy for railroad rails. The general family history has been well preserved but any know-how of the specifics of their metallurgical techniques didn't make it much past 1900, as business fortune sent the once-successful (the second generation stayed in the US and had successful steel businesses here in the USA also) family businesses into irreversible decline (I think it was in part because of the large scale consolidation of the steel industry around the turn of the 20th century).
I know that this is slightly OT from any specific antique machine tool- but hope that it is not prohibitively OT- since I know that folks here have a tremendous reservoir of knowledge and experience and might have directions to point me to learn more. It does at least in some sense have to do with the raw materials that vintage machine tools were made from- and what the vintage machine tools then made other things with.
Thanks
I am partly interested due to strong general fascination and admiration about how those who came before us did so much with what we would now consider very little to work with - and partly due to personal family heritage- my ancestors had been deeply and successfully involved in the steel industry in Wales and were originally brought to the USA in approximately the 1840s as consultants to help this country come up with more durable metallurgy for railroad rails. The general family history has been well preserved but any know-how of the specifics of their metallurgical techniques didn't make it much past 1900, as business fortune sent the once-successful (the second generation stayed in the US and had successful steel businesses here in the USA also) family businesses into irreversible decline (I think it was in part because of the large scale consolidation of the steel industry around the turn of the 20th century).
I know that this is slightly OT from any specific antique machine tool- but hope that it is not prohibitively OT- since I know that folks here have a tremendous reservoir of knowledge and experience and might have directions to point me to learn more. It does at least in some sense have to do with the raw materials that vintage machine tools were made from- and what the vintage machine tools then made other things with.
Thanks