Untitled Document

Vulcan

I'm perched by a pile of lead ingots. I feel like a pirate defending his booty. The sun gleams in pale silver hues off hundreds of freshly caste lead ingots. A base energy flows from this element. Like being hooked up to an eight thousand pound battery terminal, I feel my soul is connected to the magnetic core of the earth.

Lead is expensive at 40 cents per pound. I defrayed the costs by getting junk lead in the form of wheel weights - those little 2-inch long things they use to balance your tires. Finding lead today is like urban mining. I drove about central Virginia looking for the word, "TIRES" above a garage. Little motherloads of lead are yours for the pickin' under those signs. They usually come in plastic 5 gallon buckets that weigh about 350 lbs. when full. You need a roll cart, a pickup truck, and plenty of buckets. You need a scale because sometimes the owners want to weigh the scrap. I carried my drawings of Dancing Bear to help the owners feel part of the adventure. A great thanks to all the merchants who pitched in for the cause. A few needed their palms scratched; I paid a total of $230 dollars for $2,600 worth of lead. Ah yes, there's always a catch. The wheel weights need to be purified by fire to yield pure lead.

Once the lead was all collected back at the shop it needed to be cleaned. This was accomplished by fire. I placed tens of thousands of wheel weights into cast iron cauldrons and melted it down. It turns to liquid at 600 degrees. I used LP barbecue tanks for the fuel source and an outdoor double burner for the fire. A blowtorch designed for weed control provided additional heat. Together they produced about 1.3 million BTU's. That's over 300 times the heat of a home stove burner. Pure lead weighs 700 lbs. per cubic foot. Compare that to granite at 168 #, water at 64 #. Once the lead becomes molten liquid, everything floats on top. Steel, bronze, rocks; all float on molten lead!

My morning Mantra to prepare for the day was, VUULCAAAAN…" I breathe his name like an antitoxin into the caustic clouds that hover above my bubbling pots of lead. I call for protection and I beg for power to dispell fright, as I ladle molten lead into stainless steel molds. I summon the god of fire to lend spiritual currency to this noxious adventure. I scream, "VUULCAAAN" long. And loud. And low. The sound shakes. And the sound lingers. I invent a sound that would reverberate out of the caverns of hell.

After heating the wheel weights, the little steel tangs designed to hold them onto the tires come floating to the surface. Other materials float to the top including nuts, bolts, and old discarded parts of cars that were tossed into the lead scrap bucket back at the garage. These are skimmed off with a course screen filter welded to a 10-foot handle. Then a finer screen filters the sand & other debris. Finally, a long handled ladle is used to scoop about 15 lbs of lead from the cast iron pot into the ingot molds. Each mold weighs about 35 lbs.

I needed to caste two hundred and thirty ingots. Hundreds were behind me now. Soon the ingots would be ready for the big casting of the solid lead keel. A sailboat has a ballast keel to counter the heeling effect of the sails. Like a floating basketball with a horseshoe glued to the bottom, no matter how many times you try to roll it over, it always floats horseshoe side down. The finished keel will weigh 8000 pounds. Picture a fishing weight that is 6" x 12" by 20 feet long. It weighs about 3 Toyotas. It will be cast in two pieces for easier lifting, each about 12' long with a scarf joint toward the center.

The ballast keel is the lowest point on the boat. It is fastened with 11 bronze bolts, 7/8" in diameter, which are drilled through the wooden keel and keelson. I cut the bolts from solid bronze shafts. The treads are cut individually on my metal lathe. The "gaskets" are cut from lead. Traditionally, lead gaskets, like thick washers, are used to seat a waterproof seal at the end of the bolts.

Two pots of bubbling lead were dipped into with a long ladle, and small 35 lb. ingot molds were filled with molten lead. After casting several hundred ingots, it all grew pretty boring. UNTIL THE CAULDRON BLEW UP!!! The God Damned melting pot exploded! Three hundred pounds of molten lead blew twelve feet into the air! The explosion was over in under a second. Nevertheless, I found myself barreling into the woods like a wizard who'd conjured up a nest of evil bees out of his blackened caldron. It scared the poop out of me. HUH? I was unscathed? I regrouped a bit, collected all the bits of protective clothing that was tossed off as I ran for my life, and contemplated the disturbing cause for this hideous betrayal by the physical world. Just moments before my head was directly over the melting pot as I skimmed the lead for floating debris. It seems my error was in loading wheel weights with rusted tangs into the bubbling pot. Unlike the thousands of shovels full of weights before this one, these weights must have had an invisible bit of moisture locked into their rusty steel tangs. Water turns quickly to steam when exposed to an 800-degree environment. Steam occupies twelve times as much space as water. The expanding steam requires area. The pot explodes. Oh, my - the physical world was obviously trying to kill me. Maybe I should speak to Vulcan with a bit more respect.

A theoretical question kept appearing before me. If 300 lbs. of lead blows 12 feet up, how high does 8000 lbs. blow? I could not ask an inexperienced crew to help on this.

I decided not to caste my own keel. It was time to ask for help. I needed to find someone who does this for a living.

Coming soon: Accepting My Keel From Providence...