The New Bronze Age
This past weekend I took time out from dinghy-building to participate in the bronze-casting workshop that has been offered by the Center for Wooden Boats for a couple of decades. Originally launched by Sam Johnson, it has been ably taught by James McMullen for the past decade and a half. The two-day workshop at the Camano Island CWB facility takes you though the basics of managing and using a simple low-volume foundry for casting parts of bronze that can be put to work on a boat. Take your spouse and rent one of the Cama Beach waterfront cabins. Most of us rarely use anything hotter than our kitchen stoves. To bring 15 lbs of metal to 2000+ degrees and pour its molten spirit into a sand mold is an uncommon experience, at once primitive and technologically powerful. Literally, transformative. An undifferentiated chunk of alloy is transformed, by dint of conceptualizing, patterning, molding, melting, casting, and finishing, into a durable, usef...