Drawing Copper Wire and Rolling Sheet: Small-Shop Metalworking Before the Rolling Mill Came North
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how a country shop like Fort Wilkins turned scrap and cake copper into sheet, wire, and worm pipe by hand. He covers the British Iron Act of 1750, Paul Revere's Canton rolling mill, and why the Confederacy took stills to make percussion caps, then walks through planishing hammers, steel draw plates, annealing, and coiling a worm with dry sand. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories: a wire that snapped back and split his eyebrow, a pot made from old calico-printing rollers, and a steam blowout from wet sand. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about putting hickory ashes and red oak shavings in a thump keg, and he knocks down the old blue-flame test.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Quit rattling that chain like a deacon shaking a poor box at a funeral. You had a whole hog's head at noon, eyes and all, and I heard you crunch the jaw like a boy with rock candy. Settle down, you overstuffed hearth rug, or I will sell your hide to a Concord carriage maker for a lap robe and let some fat lawyer's wife break wind on you from here to Boston.
♦ Bear grunt, low and sulky, chain dragging across frozen ground
Wilkins: That is the sound of a four-hundred-pound animal sulking. You have never heard real misery until you've heard a bear sulk.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling beneath the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, and twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, who keeps the worst-ventilated hotel in New England. Tonight we talk about the hard labor behind every still: how a country shop turns a lump of copper into sheet, wire, and worm pipe by hammer, fire, and stubbornness, before the big rolling mills of Massachusetts ever sent their goods up the turnpike at a price a man could stand.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a coal shifting in the forge
Wilkins: But first, a word from the people who keep the lamp oil in this log fort.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want the craft of the Fort Wilkins coppersmiths on your own kitchen table? The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic is waiting at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo flourish
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Copper Before the Mill.
♦ Forge bellows wheezing, slow and steady
Wilkins: Friends, cast your mind back. In my grandfather's day a New Hampshire man could dig iron out of a bog, smelt it, and hammer it, but by the law of England he could not roll it into plate. The Iron Act of 1750, passed under King George the Second, grandfather of the George we threw out, forbade the colonies to build any new slitting mill, plating forge, or steel furnace. The Crown wanted us digging the ore and buying the finished goods back from Birmingham at a fat profit. King George's grandfather passed a law that we colonials could dig iron but not roll it, which is like letting a man court a girl but forbidding him the parlor.
Wilkins: Copper was worse off still. Nearly every sheet of it in this country came across the ocean in the hold of a ship, and you paid the Englishman, the shipper, the Boston merchant, and the peddler before it reached a Pittsfield bench. Then, in 1801, Paul Revere, the very same silversmith who rode out to Lexington, opened the first successful copper rolling mill in America at Canton, Massachusetts. His rolled sheet covered the dome of the State House in Boston, and in 1803 it went onto the bottom of the frigate Constitution, Old Ironsides herself, whose hull was more copper than iron. Paul Revere rode all night to warn of the British and then spent the rest of his life rolling copper for the Navy, which proves a patriot will do anything to get out of farming.
♦ Wax crackle; a pipe being tapped out on the anvil horn
Wilkins: But Canton is a long way from the Suncook, and rolled sheet carried a rolled price. A country smith in the 1860s bought his copper however he could get it: cake copper by the pound, old kettles off widows, worn ship sheathing hauled up from the Portsmouth yards, and lately the native copper of Lake Superior. Up on the Keweenaw in Michigan the copper comes out of the earth already copper, no smelting needed, sometimes in masses big as a meeting house. In 1857 the miners at the Minesota Mine uncovered one single lump of near-pure copper weighing about five hundred tons, and they spent months chiseling it into pieces small enough to haul. Five hundred tons, friends! That's more copper than every church bell in New Hampshire, and not one of them rings as sweetly as a jar landing on my counter.
Wilkins: Then came the war, and copper went to the guns. Every percussion cap a soldier thumbed onto his rifle nipple was a little copper cup, and the twelve-pound Napoleon field gun was cast of bronze, which is copper with a dash of tin. The price climbed like a cat up a curtain. Down South it was worse. The Confederacy ran so short of copper that their agents went out collecting the stills of whiskey makers and turpentine men to melt down for caps. The Confederacy melted down its whiskey stills to make percussion caps, which is the only war in history that was lost twice, once on the field and once in the jug.
Wilkins: So when a Yankee shop needed sheet for a pot or tube for a worm, it made its own from whatever copper it could beg, buy, or pry off a barn roof. That is the trade we honor tonight.
♪ Fiddle bridge, a lively reel that fades down
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Peddlers, Deputies, and a Bench Full of Holes.
♦ Wagon wheels on frozen ruts, harness bells
Wilkins: Let me tell you about the copper peddler. A few years back a Concord man came rattling up Route 28 with a wagon full of rolled sheet, clean as new butter, and asked me a price that would make a Portsmouth harbor pilot blush. A copper peddler from Concord charges such a price for rolled sheet that I would sooner pull my own molars with a doorknob and a mule. I told him no thank you. He called me a backwoods hammer-monkey and spat on my step. Then the man got curious and wandered round back to see what a hammer-monkey's copper looked like, which put him one long stride inside Barnaby's chain.
♦ Bear roar, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: Barnaby doesn't charge like a dog. He rolls in sideways like a fallen hayrick. He took that peddler's coattail in his teeth, and the seat of his good wool breeches along with it, and a fair portion of what the breeches had been covering. I heard the cloth go first, a long sound like a sail tearing, and then a wet pop like pulling a boot out of April mud, and then a holler that set every dog barking clear to Barnstead Parade. The fellow made it to his wagon with his backside hanging out like a fresh ham at the butcher's, bright red and dripping down the backs of his knees. I stitched him with waxed linen on my tooth-pulling chair, eleven stitches, and charged him for neither the thread nor the whiskey, because a man ought to show charity to a fellow who has been bitten in the business end. That tinker sat on his own wagon seat like a hen on a hot griddle for a fortnight, and his wife said it was the most attentive he had been to her in nine years.
♦ Wax crackle, a short chuckle
Wilkins: Then there's the deputy and my draw plate. The first time the sheriff's men came poking around Fort Wilkins, one of them, a young pup with whiskers like a burnt broom, found my wire-drawing plate on the bench. It's a slab of hardened steel full of tapered holes, big to small. He held it up to the light and his eyes went big as pie plates. 'Counterfeiting die!' says he. 'The doctor is making false coin!' Now, I do put my name on coin, friends, with an honest punch for all to see, but I don't make the money, I only autograph it. The deputy took my draw plate for a counterfeiter's die, and I told him if I could counterfeit money with a piece of steel full of holes, I would have printed myself a better sheriff.
Wilkins: They carried that plate all the way to Concord as evidence. So I asked the magistrate for a bit of copper rod and a pair of tongs, filed a point, greased it with a lump of candle tallow, and drew that rod through hole after hole right there in front of the bench while the clerk timed me on his watch. I pulled that wire through the plate in open court until it was fine enough to floss a magistrate's teeth, and he had a mouthful that needed it. They handed the plate back with an apology that cost them nothing. I gave them nothing back for it, and the books balanced.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing off the anvil
Wilkins: That's a large cent getting my name on it. You'll notice how the copper spreads under the blow. A cent struck too hard flows out at the rim like pancake batter on a hot griddle. Hold that thought, because the whole art of a copper shop lives in that one fact: copper moves. Now let me bring in the man who knows how to move it better than anyone in the valley. He's out of the foundry shed with soot in his ears. Please welcome Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Silas, sit down, mind the bear grease on that stool.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. I'll stand a minute, if it's all the same. Stools in this fort have a way of being sticky.
Wilkins: Silas, tell the folks why a man who hammers copper for a living has a scar running through his left eyebrow like a plowed furrow.
Silas: Because I was nineteen and in a hurry, Doctor, and copper doesn't forgive a hurry. I was drawing wire for a rivet run, a rod about as thick as your little finger, taking it down hole by hole in the plate. Now, every pull hardens the metal. By the time you've pulled through three or four holes, that copper has gone stiff as a frozen bootlace. You're supposed to stop, heat it to a dull red, and let it go soft again. I skipped it. Then I skipped it again. I got her clean through eighteen holes on pure stubbornness, and at the nineteenth she let go. The wire snapped right at the plate, and the loose end whipped back at me like a coachman's lash. It opened my eyebrow to the bone. I bled into my own eye so bad I thought I'd gone blind in it, and my father dabbed me with spirit and said, 'Now you know what an anneal is for.'
Wilkins: A smith who skips his anneal is like a groom who skips the courting: something is going to snap, and it will be his face that pays.
Silas: That broken coil hangs over my shop door to this day. Every apprentice who walks under it asks what it is, and I tell him it's the cheapest lesson I ever bought.
Wilkins: Now tell them about the roses. This one I love.
Silas: There's a print works down in Dover, the Cocheco company, that prints calico cloth with big copper rollers, engraved all over with flowers and vines. When a roller wears smooth they sell it off as scrap. My grandfather bought a wagon load of them cheap, cut them open, and flattened them under the hammer for pot stock. Most of the engraving beat out. But there's one pot from that lot, and if you hold a candle inside it at just the right slant you can still see a faint pattern of roses running round the belly, like a ghost of somebody's Sunday dress.
Wilkins: A still with calico roses inside it. Silas, that's the only flower garden in Merrimack County a man can get drunk in and nobody calls the parson.
Silas: My grandmother said it was the only pretty thing my grandfather ever made, and she'd been married to him forty years.
Wilkins: Now I'm told one of your apprentices once tried to shoot a farmer with a worm pipe.
Silas: Not on purpose. When you bend a copper tube into a coil, you pack it tight with sand first, so the walls don't fold in and kink. And the sand has to be dry. Bone dry, dried in a pan over the fire. My apprentice took sand off the riverbank that had been sitting in a bucket all night and packed it in damp. He drove a wooden plug in each end, put the torch to the first bend, and the water in that sand turned to steam with nowhere to go. That plug came out of the pipe like a ball out of a musket and crossed the whole shop. A farmer from Barnstead was standing by the door smoking a clay pipe, waiting on a kettle repair, and the plug took the pipe clean out of his mouth. It left him the stem and his teeth and not one thing more.
Wilkins: That steam-shot plug knocked the pipe out of a Barnstead farmer's mouth so clean that he thanked Silas for curing him of tobacco.
Silas: He did thank me, Doctor, about a month later. Said he couldn't afford another pipe after paying my bill.
Wilkins: Tell the folks about the Sanbornton looking glass.
Silas: A Sanbornton man wanted the finest pot in the county and said so loud and often. So I planished it, which means going over every inch with a polished hammer on a polished stake, light blows, overlapping like fish scales, until the surface goes smooth and bright and stiff. I went at that pot most of a week. When I was through you could read a newspaper in the reflection, provided you read backwards. Well, his wife set it in the kitchen, caught sight of herself in it, and found her first gray hairs. She came to my shop with a rolling pin and told me to hammer it dull again.
Wilkins: Silas planished that pot so bright the lady found gray hairs in it, and a man who can make a woman furious with a hammer from forty miles off is an artist.
Silas: I didn't dull it. I sold her a lid to cover it.
Wilkins: Ha! Now the last one, and I was here for it, so mind you tell it true.
Silas: An apprentice of mine, a different fool, ran short of tallow for the draw bench and greased it with bacon fat from his dinner pail. We stepped out for coffee. When we came back the window was busted in, there was fur all over the bench, and the bench was licked so clean you could see the grain. And Barnaby was sitting in the snow outside with forty feet of half-drawn wire tangled in his teeth, chewing on it like taffy. He'd pulled it right off the bench and half through the plate. He'd drawn it finer than my apprentice ever had.
Wilkins: Barnaby drew forty feet of wire with his teeth, which is more honest work than the Merrimack County Commissioners have done since Polk. It took two of us and a smoked ham to get that wire back, and the bear had his gums cut up something terrible. He bled down his chin onto the snow so it looked like a hog butchering, and he never complained once. A tougher patient than any selectman I've ever pulled a tooth from. Silas, stay right where you are. We've got a word from our sponsor, and after that I want you at the anvil with me.
♪ Banjo sting, then a brisk patent-medicine-show fanfare
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, step closer to the lamp and lend me your ears! You have heard tonight what it takes to raise a copper pot by hand: the fire, the hammer, the anneal, the patience of a saint and the forearms of a blacksmith. Now, what if all that craft could sit on your own tabletop? Behold the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, a compact pure copper tabletop alembic! It is built of heavy-gauge, pure electrolytic copper, twenty-ounce spun copper, gleaming like a new-struck cent. The handles are hand-riveted, and quick-connect cooling lines fasten on in a moment. It is the premier choice for distilling botanical waters, drawing essential floral oils, and putting on a countertop demonstration that will have your parlor guests gasping! The precision of the Fort Wilkins coppersmiths, on a compact scale, for only two hundred eighty-nine dollars! See it for yourself in the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or visit moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic this very day. Once more, so you don't forget: moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic! Explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com. Available today!
♪ Fanfare resolves into fiddle
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Hammer, Plate, and Fire: How the Worm Is Born.
♦ Forge fire roaring as bellows pump; hammer ringing on a stake
Wilkins: All right, friends. Here's how a country shop makes its own copper stock, step by step, the way we do it at Fort Wilkins. First, sheet. If you've got cake copper or scrap, you melt it in a clay crucible, pour it into an iron mold, and get a thick slab. Copper melts at about nineteen hundred and eighty-four degrees by the Fahrenheit glass, which is hotter than a sheriff's temper on election day, so you need a good charcoal fire and a strong bellows boy.
Silas: And a dry mold, Doctor. Molten copper hitting a wet mold spits like a cornered cat, and it sticks to your skin.
Wilkins: Right you are. Now you take that slab to the anvil and draw it out under the hammer. You hammer from the middle outward, turning and turning, so the metal spreads even, and the slab gets wider and thinner a little at a time. And here's the great secret of copper, friends. The more you hammer it, the harder and stiffer it gets. We call that work-hardening. Hammer too long without relief and she'll crack at the edges like a dry biscuit. Copper is like an old widower: hammer on him long enough and he goes stiff and brittle, warm him up proper and he goes soft and agreeable again.
Silas: So every so often you anneal. Put the sheet back in the fire and bring it up to a dull red. Judge it in a shaded corner of the shop, not in the sunlight, or you'll heat it too far. Then you can quench it right in the water tub.
Wilkins: Now that surprises the farrier boys. Steel quenched goes hard, but copper quenched stays soft, and the plunge cracks off a good deal of the black scale besides. But don't overheat it. Copper cooked too hot grows a coarse grain inside, and when you work it after, the surface comes up pebbly like an orange peel and won't take a fine finish. Many a pot has been ruined by a smith who thought hotter meant faster.
Silas: You clean the scale off in a pickle. Some shops use a weak bath of oil of vitriol in water. That's a burning acid, and you always pour the acid into the water and never the water into the acid, or it boils up in your face. Plain vinegar and salt is slower but kinder to your eyes.
Wilkins: Hammer, anneal, pickle, and hammer again, until your sheet is the thickness you want. Coppersmiths judge sheet by its weight in ounces to the square foot. Sixteen-ounce is a thin roofing sheet, twenty-ounce is a sturdy vessel wall, and heavier than that is for a pot that has to stand up to a lifetime of fire. Once the sheet is raised into a pot or a helmet over the stakes, you planish it, as Silas told you. Light, overlapping blows with the polished hammer over the polished stake. Planishing smooths the dents from the raising hammer and stiffens the wall at the same time. Every one of those little hammer facets you see on a good old pot is a smith's fingerprint.
♦ Rapid, light planishing taps, bright and musical
Wilkins: Now, wire. For rivets, wire bails, and lacing, you draw it. Hammer a rod round, file a long point on one end, smear it with tallow or beeswax, and poke the point through the first hole in the draw plate that's just a hair smaller than the rod. Grip the point in your draw tongs, brace the plate against the bench stops, and pull with your whole back. Then the next hole down, and the next, and anneal every few holes, unless you want an eyebrow like Silas.
Silas: Keep the holes clean and the grease fresh, too. A dirty hole scores the wire and leaves a weak spot, and that's exactly where she'll break.
Wilkins: And now the crown of tonight's lesson: the worm. The worm is the coiled pipe that sits in a tub of cold water and turns hot spirit vapor back to liquid. In these hills a good worm starts life as a hand-beaten flat sheet. Silas, take them through it.
Silas: You cut a long strip off your sheet, as wide as the pipe's girth plus a little for the seam. You lay it in a grooved swage block and drive it round an iron mandrel with a mallet, a foot at a time, until the edges meet. Then you braze the seam. Brush on borax flux, lay on spelter or silver solder, and heat it until the solder runs into the joint like water into a crack. And never lead solder, folks. Not in a worm, not in a pot, not anywhere spirit touches. Lead is poison.
Wilkins: When the tube is made, you may draw it once over a mandrel through a die to true it round. Then you pack it with sand, dry as gunpowder, and tamp it tight. Some old shops filled their pipes with molten lead to bend them, and I won't have it in this fort, because lead hides in the seams and comes out in the drink. Dry sand, a plug in each end, an anneal, and then you wrap the tube slow around a log or a wooden drum, coil after coil, warming it as you go. Then you pour out the sand, rinse it, and blow through it to be sure it's open end to end.
Silas: And test it under water with a bit of breath pressure before it ever sees a still. A pinhole in a worm leaks vapor, and vapor near a fire is how still-houses burn down.
Wilkins: Amen. Now, why copper the whole way? Because spirit vapor rising off a ferment carries sulfur stinks, and copper takes them on itself. That isn't only in the pot head. The worm does its share along every inch the vapor travels. A worm of bright copper is working the whole time the spirit runs. That's why you keep the inside clean and bright after every run.
Wilkins: And the cuts, which no amount of fine copper will do for you. When a run starts, the first spirit out of the worm is the foreshots, then the heads, and those carry the methanol and the harsh solvents that blind and kill. Set them aside and get rid of them. Never drink them, never give them away. Catch your run in many small jars, numbered in order, not one big crock, so you can judge each one by nose. Keep the hearts in the middle, and set the oily tails aside. Keep a low, steady fire, keep the still-house aired out, and keep open flame away from any leak. And mind the law: to this day the government forbids distilling spirit to drink without a federal permit, and everything on this program is offered for history and education only.
Wilkins: Silas, you've earned your coffee and more. Folks, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister!
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. And somebody check on that bear. I heard him chewing on something out there, and I don't want it to be my wagon.
♦ Bear grunt, then a loud splintering crunch
Wilkins: It's your wagon tongue, Silas. I'll put it on your bill.
♪ Banjo walk-down
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. The Call-In Cylinder and an Old Lie Put to the Torch.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Let's open the mail bag and crank the talking cylinder from our call-in line. This one comes all the way from the Blue Ridge country.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, thin and distant, a faint hiss of a recording
Cletus: Alchemist, this is Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, down in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you and the whole Miller clan in Wilkes County. Let's take your uncle's two notions one at a time, because they're not the same animal. First, the hickory ashes. Hardwood ash is potash, friends, the stuff of lye. Your grandmother boils fat with it and gets soap, and the same lye will eat the skin off your knuckles and blind you if it splashes. A doubler full of lye and spirit makes something closer to a wash kettle than a drink. Cletus, a man who dumps lye ashes into his doubler is cooking soap, and if he drinks it, he will at least be the cleanest corpse in Wilkes County. Ash in the doubler won't pull methanol out of a run, because there's no trick in any keg that can do the separating your cuts are meant to do.
Wilkins: The red oak shavings are a little different. Oak in the doubler will give up some color and tannin to the spirit, and a bit of woody flavor. Some old hands put apples or peaches in the doubler for the same reason, for flavor. That part your uncle has half right. But flavor isn't cleaning, Rabbit. Bad heads are cleaned out by the jar and the nose and the discard bucket, and nothing else.
Wilkins: I'll tell you how I learned to respect lye. Barnaby once ate a bar of lye soap off a washerwoman's line down by the Suncook. He swallowed it whole, paper and all, and for three days that bear blew suds out of both ends. Bubbles came out his nose every time he snorted, and out the other end every time he squatted, big rainbow bubbles drifting off over the turnpike while the stagecoach passengers hung out the windows and cheered. Barnaby once ate a bar of lye soap off a washerwoman's line and blew bubbles out his backside till Thursday, and that is the most chemistry I ever want to see from a bear. The washerwoman billed me two bits for the soap. I paid it gladly. It was the cleanest that animal has been since he was a cub.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, thank you for calling. You're a sharp-eared fellow, and you tell your uncle the Alchemist says his swamp medicine is half flavor, half soap, and no cure at all. A Pittsfield large cent with my name on it is on its way to you in the post.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now one more old lie to put to the torch: the blue flame. Old-timers will pour a spoonful of spirit, light it, and say if it burns blue it's safe, and if it burns yellow or red, there's lead in it. Fine theater. Worthless test. Good ethanol burns with a pale blue flame, and so does methanol, the very poison you're trying to catch. Methanol's flame is so faint in daylight you can scarcely see it. A spoon of deadly heads will burn just as blue and pretty as a spoon of good hearts. And flame color won't reliably tell you about lead either. Lighting a spoonful of spirit to judge it by the blue flame is like judging a parson by his hat: it burns pretty and tells you nothing about what is underneath. The only things that keep spirit safe are honest metal, with no lead solder anywhere, and honest cuts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the ring fading slowly
♪ Fiddle and banjo, low and warm
Announcer: One more quick word! Bring the copper craft of Fort Wilkins home with the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic, hand-riveted and pure copper, at moonshinestill.com. Visit moonshinestill.com today!
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF.
Wilkins: Well, friends, the fire's banked, the anvil's cooling, and somewhere out there a bear is picking a wagon tongue out of his teeth. If tonight's talk of hammers and draw plates lit a fire in you, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn the history, the metallurgy, the honest cuts, and the safety every craftsman owes his neighbors, taught plain and Yankee, the way I'd teach my own apprentices if I could find any who'd outlast the bear. My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, and to every soul tuned in from the Suncook to the sea. Remember, a sheet of copper is only a lump of patience that's been hit enough times. That goes for men too.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme rises, then fades into wax cylinder crackle