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275810 | John Ruth <johnrruth@h...> | 2022‑06‑29 | Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
GG's I found this interesting even though I don't speak a word of this dialect: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OEOEggYgskU I recommend watching this even without any understanding of the narration or captions. Perhaps some more linguistic Galoot can inform us of the finer points. That mine is downright medieval !!! The US Mine Safety Administration would have apoplexy after one glance! You can only wonder how dark it is down there when there is no video crew in there with their electric lights! No Personal Protective Equipment whatsoever. The two-man push-pull saw is interesting. Note the worker setting the teeth with a hammer, freehand! What sort of a saw plate would this be? How thick? Although Roy Underhill wrote of trying to "harvest" whetstones in the wild, have any Porch dwellers actually found one? John Ruth Recalling that somebody has/had an oddly shaped stone embedded in a block of wood. |
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275811 | Bridger Berdel <bridgerberdel@g...> | 2022‑06‑29 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
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275812 | scritch <capeflattery@c...> | 2022‑06‑29 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
I have found several of these types of videos. Apparently, there have been efforts in several European countries to documents the old ways of production before the practitioners have all died. I have found French, Spanish, and German videos so far. One video, related to this whetstone video, is a German one showing a bunch of old duffers cutting and shaping huge grinding wheels from native rock. It's amazing how just a few men could cut and maneuver a huge stone using just picks and pry bars. |
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275813 | Bill Ghio | 2022‑06‑29 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
> On Jun 29, 2022, at 12:05 PM, John Ruth |
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275814 | michael petre <petre.mic@g...> | 2022‑06‑29 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
That's roughly an hour drive from where I was born and grew up. I can take notes, translate and post the full transcript to the list if you want :) > That mine is downright medieval !!! The US Mine Safety Administration would have apoplexy after one glance! You can only wonder how dark it is down there when there is no video crew in there with their electric lights! No Personal Protective Equipment whatsoever. The coticule was quarried since Roman times and there aren't that many veins around so there's a chance it was indeed medieval :) And yeah, Belgium mines weren't exactly the safest places to work in, especially old ones like the one shown in the video. > The two-man push-pull saw is interesting. Note the worker setting the teeth with a hammer, freehand! What sort of a saw plate would this be? How thick? The saw plate is salvaged from a broken scythe blade, and the worker is not so much setting the teeth as making new ones (they're referring to it as sharpening the saw but that's not sharpening). The cutting action of the saw actually comes from the wet sand that is poured on the stone. The whetstone is then polished on a sandstone that is lubricated once more with wet sand. Originally this was seasonal work for local farmers, to get some more income during the winter... this is why the saw blades were made from broken scythes (waste not want not). Similar story with the semi-industrialized process they show next, which is probably late 19th or very early 20th century. The swinging multiple blades frame saw is actually mostly providing the pressure and the cutting action is from the wet sand that's poured on the stone on a regular basis. The long strips then get chopped to correct dimensions and are sent off to the polish. The more modern process, using a circular saw doesn't need much explanation. With the more modern process, thicker coticule layers get cut and the offcut is then glued to a slate backing using resin. Resin is also used to reinforce lower quality coticules with cracks or defects (the bit with the hot iron where they rub a stick of resin). The polishing of the whetstone is done on a large cast iron disc that is once again using wet sand. There are two different grades of sand used, the rough one to finish dimensioning and flattening the whetstones. Then the final polishing with very fine sand coming from two possible quarries... one of which being the place where I grew up. > Although Roy Underhill wrote of trying to "harvest" whetstones in the wild, have any Porch dwellers actually found one? I did harvest whetstones from the wild, there are several known spots in Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Germany where you can easily find decent whetstones. I still have a stash of metamorphic rock downstairs that slurries readily and finishes edges somewhere between 6000 and 8000. That metamorphic rock came from the back side of Trier in Germany, close to the old slate quarries. There are several known veins for whetstones in that area... there's an historical quarry along the Moselle between Trier and the Luxembourg border. There are also two historical quarries between Trier and Bitburg, which used to supply whetstones for Solingen and Remscheid. As far as I can tell, and I spent a couple of years researching in old German books, the metamorphic rock I collected in Trier was never commercially quarried. I'm currently living in France, not too far from the mine where the "La Lune" whetstones were quarried... I actually visited part of that mine two years ago. The "La Lune" mine, the coticule mines and the Eifel area of Germany are actually part of the same mountain range, and very rich in slate and metamorphic rocks. The biggest activity in the "La Lune" mine wasn't the whetstones but the slate and the activity died down when cheaper slate was imported from other countries. I do believe the "La Lune" is commercially quarried again, but on a very small scale (I think it's a one-man operation, similar to the Welsh slate hones operation near Yellow Lake). It's always worth picking up thick slates (1" or 2" thick) that have a light sparkle to them and to wet rub them with a piece of similar material. If you get a slurry, chances are you could use that as a hone after lapping. |
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275815 | gary allan may | 2022‑06‑29 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
Bill and John--- Yeah, Ed was pretty proud of that stone. I think that was an amateur job, somebody finding a nice bit of stone and mounting it, all for free. Paleo-galootic, shall we say? I still have a number of tools Ed gifted me over the years, and I still miss pretty much him every day. best to all galoots everywhere, gam in OlyWA/USA Bill Ghio via groups.io |
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275816 | John Ruth <johnrruth@h...> | 2022‑06‑29 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
> On Jun 29, 2022, at 4:05 PM, michael petre |
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275817 | gtgrouch@r... | 2022‑06‑29 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
I have a whetstone from Charnley Forest that I got from Jeff Gorman (stone you picked up from the forest, Jeff). It has a fine grain and puts a good edge on knives. Since it was rough and irregular, I used a tile saw to split it in half. Thank you to a great Galoot that I still miss, Gary Katsanis Albion New York, USA -----------------------------------------From: "John Ruth" To: "porch" Cc: Sent: Wednesday June 29 2022 12:06:25PM Subject: [oldtools] Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 GG's I found this interesting even though I don't speak a word of this dialect: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OEOEggYgskU /> I recommend watching this even without any understanding of the narration or captions. Perhaps some more linguistic Galoot can inform us of the finer points. That mine is downright medieval !!! The US Mine Safety Administration would have apoplexy after one glance! You can only wonder how dark it is down there when there is no video crew in there with their electric lights! No Personal Protective Equipment whatsoever. The two-man push-pull saw is interesting. Note the worker setting the teeth with a hammer, freehand! What sort of a saw plate would this be? How thick? Although Roy Underhill wrote of trying to "harvest" whetstones in the wild, have any Porch dwellers actually found one? John Ruth Recalling that somebody has/had an oddly shaped stone embedded in a block of wood. Links: ------ [1] https://groups.io/g/oldtools/unsub |
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275818 | michael petre <petre.mic@g...> | 2022‑06‑30 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
Believe it or not… that dialect is French. It is correct for the era of the video. Historically, that area would have been Walloon, Luxemburgish or German speaking. Linguistics in Belgium is a complicated matter, especially close to the borders. That region of Belgium used to belong to Luxembourg, but Luxemburgish wasn’t spoken everywhere in Luxembourg. In my area, the use of Luxemburgish in schools was banned in the 1960s. The sticks they use to blast the vein aren’t even dynamite, it’s just black powder rolled in newspaper. The work sequence was to drill the holes in the morning, pack and blast before lunch, have your lunch break on the surface while the smoke/fumes dissipated, then evacuate the debris to get to the good stuff. In this mine, they were just dumping the debris in a tip. Some mines were actually selling the debris as construction material. Many houses in that part of Belgium were built using the debris from mining. The dark violet layer closest to the white/yellow coticule is also a whetstone… the Belgian blue stone. Only part of that layer contains garnets tho… so once again, the garnet-less layer is used for construction: windows ledges, windows surrounds, door surrounds and walkway curbs. The blue stone is slippery when wet, so you had to be careful stepping off the walkway in the rain. They have been replaced with concrete over the years. The quick test to know if the dark side of the coticule is blue stone is once again to slurry it… if the slurry is grey/white, you have a cheap slate back glued to coticule. If it has a purplish hue, it should be the real deal. |
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275819 | Bill Kasper <dragon01list@g...> | 2022‑06‑30 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
michael, are you still living there? i am curious as to the number of coticule stones that could be found "in the wild", as it were. not "in the wild" at an abandoned quarry, but at boot sales, antieek mauls, etc. we don't see a huge amount of things from outside the usa here on the west coast, unless it's from japan. i don't know about out east. but if you tell me they're not difficult to find i'll make sure to look when my wife and i visit the low countries. thanks, bill felton, ca |
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275820 | michael petre <petre.mic@g...> | 2022‑06‑30 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
Hi Bill! I have found a few on flea markets in Belgium, France and Germany. But you won’t find them all the time. If you have a rough idea of when you’d visit, give me a shout off-list and I’ll try to list decent flea markets in the area (north-east of France, south-east of Belgium, Rheinland-Pfalz in Germany). |
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275821 | Claudio DeLorenzi <claudio@d...> | 2022‑06‑30 | Re: Video of Mining and Fabricating Coticule Whetstones circa 1971 |
My father had one of those blue stones from Belgium that he wore down to a little slip over the years. This stone was perfect for butcher/meat cutting knives (another one of his many practical skills). His brother got it for him from Belgium (BTW, his brother worked in the coal mines in Belgium and died of coal miner pneumoconiosis - AKA "black lung"- in his late 30's, echoing earlier comments about horrific working conditions in those days. Although health and safety people are sometimes a little overboard, let's not forget all of the good they have accomplished). As another aside: Did anyone else notice that the bottom rung of the ladder was broken during the introductory scene when the first man descended into the mine? I thought that was foreboding... Cheers from Waterloo On Thu., Jun. 30, 2022, 12:51 p.m. michael petre, |
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