Completed Metallurgy Research: Tin

[Ornea]

Metallurgy research: Tin
Timestamp: Day 1 of Spring 515 AV, in the morning
Location: Lucis and Lucis techical documentation library

ORNEA STARTS AT BASIC RESEARCH ABOUT TIN

Ornea was working at Lucis like she did most days and it would soon be time for metalsmithing again. She was now preparing, and Edward had told her to read up about what he called advanced alloys. This wasn’t so easy, because there weren’t really any books about advanced alloys. Ornea had tried in vain to find one at the Bharani library.

Finally she had decided to rummage through the notes in Lucis own technical library where they stored all the information about their own projects, in the past, in the present and for the future. Obviously she would need to dig through everything personally and try to gather and document as much information as possible about the topic. She would need to do her won research, using the documentation. Then Lucis could go on from there.

Edward Lucis was great at many things but organizing information wasn’t his forte. Or maybe he was just prone to give priority to new interesting development and postpone the work with the documentation later, which meant it was postponed for good.

Ornea had found a section in the room that she thought was about metals and alloys. There was a low, nearly flat, wooden box, full of an mix of pergament sheets, finer paper sheets, notebooks of simple quality, scraps and palimpsests. Ornea settled for bringing this box with her to the table where she would sit and work and had a new notebook, ink and quill ready to use.

This would no doubt be a challenge ...

She took the paper on top of the pile in the box. A closer investigation told her it was about tin and possibly about tin alloys as well. The handwriting on it was hard to read. It must have been somebody else than Edward who had written it, she concluded as she studied the scribblings. They were uneven in the way that revealed a hand not much used to writing. But Ornea didn’t want to dismiss it as unimportant just because of how it looked. She studied it for a while and investigated every word and letter in order to find out the content. Yes, the text sure seemed to be about tin.

Finally she wrote down her findings in the notebook. She took the quill, dipped it in ink and started to write, and although she wasn’t a skilled scribe exactly, she had the steady hand of a competent crafter who is used to precision work. What she lacked in practice she tried to compensate by writing slowly and carefully. The result was a fully readable paragraph of text. It wasn’t beautiful, but you can’t have everything.

“Tin” she wote. "Tin is a metal white as silver and soft and malleable as hard clay. One interesting thing with tin is that it can easily be shaped into a multitude of forms. This fascinating metal can sometimes nearly seem to have an innate life of its own. Sometimes when you bend tin you can hear it scream; this is called the tin scream. And sometimes, if it’s freezing it will fall ill and go grey; this is called the tin pest.”

She sprinkled fine sand over the text and watched it suck up the surplus ink. Then she waited a bit more, before she carefully blew the sand away. This was how the ink was prevented from being smeared out in the page. It was an important step in the writing, to dry the text properly so it would stay readable and neat.

...

[Ornea]

THE RESEARCH CONTINUES

Ornea had learnt about metals when she was an apprentice of course, but it had been in a more down to earth way. She was familiar with the phenomena described in the text and had actually heard that odd screaming sound from the metal, once on a while when she had bent a piece of cast tin. Nobody knew what caused it, had been the answer when she had asked her teacher about it.

It could seem mysterious. But Ornea was used to that. This was how things often were, in a world where science had no answers. There were so many things you couldn’t know, so many more things between heaven and earth that people didn’t understand. The world was full of questions, riddles, enigmas and unexplained phenomena, every day. To Ornea this meant she could be intrigued and wonder about things, but the worlds general lack of knowledge didn’t deter her from anything. She put the unanswered questions to the side and went on with her devices. What else could she have done.

She dipped the quill in ink again and continued to write. Her hand moved slowly and carefully and she formed every letter as well as she could. Some of them became too big and some too small, but she continued to strive to keep the total within a reasonable span of differences in size and style. She guessed the way she wrote would improve eventually, if she would write often.

“Tin”, she wrote. “Tin is extracted from the tin ore or from clay that contains tin, by heating the ore or clay up in an oven and then add coal when it is molten. This creates a chemical reaction and the tin can be extracted. The metal can then be shaped any way you like to shape it. You can make tin thread of it, you can flatten it out and make thin sheets of tin, you can use it to cast items by pouring it into a mold; the possibilities are unlimited. But tin is also a very soft metal and not well suited to any end that requires hard and enduring metal items. Often times it’s used for decoration and for art. It can however be used in combinations with other metals, the kind of blended man made metals which are called alloys.”

This was not totally new for Ornea. But she felt interested regardless. The text confirmed things she knew a bit about but expressed it in other ways, and if felt like this added to her insight. She was passionate about her craft and she never tired of thinking of it. Now she watched her own text about the tin so far and felt content. No step forward in her craft was too small, no detail too insignificant. She wanted to understand it all, in depth.

She observed a few uneven letters and a few spelling mistakes too. For scribe standards, it would be considered a novice work. She knew that. But it was still mostly alright, in her opinion, as it was possible to read it. Maybe she would one day achieve mastery and write a book about metal, just like her own mother had done about glass. For a few ticks Ornea’s thoughts strayed to her heirloom, the book written by Mereth, “The Philosopy of Transparency”. But she soon turned her attention back to her work again.

...

[Ornea]

THE RESEARCH CONTINUES

Anew she investigated the paper from the box. She had a closer look at every word and sentence until it was clear to her what the content was. Her patience with the unknown scribbler who had penned it had started to feel taxed. If she had just known who it was she would have dressed him or her down for writing so badly that it looked like a bird hand jumped around on paper.

When she was ready for it, she started to write again. She dipped the quill in ink and started to form letters, words, sentences and mad a new paragraph in the notebook. This new paragraph shared the looks of the two first one, unskilled but readable.

“Tin”, she wrote. “Tin can be polished to high shine and is beautiful to look at, though it’s not as expensive as silver. Some call it the silver of the poor, although it’s not really that cheap. But, the affordable price makes tin very popular to use for somewhat finer practical things like goblets, cups and mugs, plates and cutlery. It’s also often used to make boxes, wases, candlesticks and lanterns, figurines, pearls and other jewellery pieces. Metal thread made of tin can be used for decoration of items and garments and it can be braided into things like headbands, arm rings and broaches. “

There were so many things she could craft! Ornea was seized by an intense desire to craft at once. She wanted to make those tin items polished to shine like silver; the goblets and cups that could be plain or decorated with simple or complicated patterns, the cups and mugs of different sized and forms, the plates, the cutlery. She wanted to craft beautiful boxes of interesting shapes, wases for smaller flowers and for long stemmed lilies, candlesticks for single candles or many-branched, lanterns with perforated patterns or of braided metal wire or combinations thereof, statuettes and figurines, pearls, jewellery, embellishments.

All this was passing by in her mind and carried her away in dreams of what could be. It was like she could see all these things in her inner vision and it was like they screamed to be made real. Screamed, yes screamed, the scream of the tin when it bends and breaks !

The thought of that sound made her come out with a jolt, from the dreamy mental state she had entered. Petch. She had lost focus and forgotten what she was doing. This never happened at the foundry area, and she had come to expect it to never happen at Lucis and Lucis. Here was the refuge where here mind was always stable and she was always focused, never tripping away on sidetracks in the middle of other things. But obviously she had been wrong. It could happen in Lucis.

This revelation fuelled her determination. She returned her attention to the research work and kept it there.

...

[Ornea]

THE RESEARCH CONTINUES

Renewed investigation into the text on the paper she had started reading told her it held some more information of use that could be extracted before putting it aside. It was tricky to read it and interpret it, but now when she had been lost in dreams and was set on making up for it she strived on tenaciously until she had materials for a new paragraph to her own notebook.

Relieved to get to rest from the petched paper of hard to read scribblings, she took the quill and dipped it in ink. Then she started to write again, and as it had worked out well to write slowly and carefully and put effort into every letter she used the same technique again. She had learnt from that shyke-written paper how important readability was. It was better to write slowly and make a readable text, than write fast and make a mess.

“Tin” she wrote. “Some are also saying that there’s observations that can indicate that tin can shelter other metal items if they are coated in tin. If this is true or not isn’t safe to say, but there has been people who were of the opinion that if you coat iron in tin the iron will not corrode. I guess this could be worth experimenting with in order to find out if there’s any truth to it or if is a temporary effect that has been exaggerated. It can even be a lie and I cannot know who it was that said this. The paper I found it on was badly written and it don’t tell where the information comes from.

But I decided to make a note about this, for future use. I will ask Edward if he knows about this and have used it. If he doesn’t have any answers it might be possible to experiment with coating things in tin in order to see if this prevents corrosion. Metal details on the lifts a Sharai Peak ought to be good to test it on. There seemed to be some corrosion when we inspected them.”


She definitely felt very content now. This was an interesting idea. If Edward would be interested they could work at it. And she also felt content because it was now time for the remainder of the information of that terrible paper to be checked and used and after this she would later be able to go on to next thing in the pile in the box.

She glanced at the box and wondered if the next topic would be tin too. Maybe the materials were more organized than they looked. But somehow she doubted it. The best could be to skip over a few pages in the notebook in order to make room for more text about tin later on if more things would turn up. Or perhaps it would be better to make separate notebooks, one for each metal?

It would require a number of notebooks and be more expensive for Lucis and likely also a waste of paper if the notebooks weren’t filled. But it made sense to her to make one notebook per metal. And one notebook per alloy too maybe. This would make it so much easier and more practical to find the information quickly in the future.

She decided to complete the work with the current paper and then find Edward and explain her ideas to him and petition him for more notebooks to use for this metal research project he had tasked her with.

...

[Ornea]

THE RESEARCH CONTINUES

Ornea had reached the last part of the second side of the paper and there she would finally read about something that was at least related to what Edward had wanted her to look into. Alloys. She read it through several times, as usual struggling to understand the crappy handwriting. When she felt she had investigated it in depth and made sure she hadn’t misunderstood a single letter, word or sentence she prepared to write again. The quill had gone a little bit blunt and she sharpened it a bit before she dipped it in the ink again.

All this constant dipping in ink was somewhat tiresome. How much better it would have been if the quill could have hold a little more ink at the time. But this was a feather quill and it was just like all the other feather quills. It needed to be dipped in ink endlessly.

“Tin”, she wrote. “This useful metal is soft. This limits its usefulness. And according to the paper I have taken this information from (Author unknown) it can be destroyed by strong acids and other strong chemicals, but it’s not affected by air or water like for example copper and iron is.”

Here she paused to check that she had really understood it right that tin was actually an alloy. It had seemed so given that it must be a natural metal when she had seen it was extracted from ore. She pondered the phrasing a bit and then she wrote again.

“Tin” she wrote. “This paper is saying that the tin used for crafting is actually an alloy. This can be because the tin extracted isn’t one hundred percent pure tin, there are impurities and this make it a natural alloy. But it can also be made an alloy by adding cooper or lead. The tin we use for crafting use to consist of between 85 to 99 % pure tin, and the rest is something else. By adding lead, which is a soft metal too, the general properties of the tin isn’t affected much, but it gets a distinctive blue color. But by adding some copper, the otherwise so soft tin becomes a bit stronger.”

This was actually new information for Ornea as they hadn’t worked with tin this way in Wind Reach, where the reddish copper was a preferred metal. Tin was maybe a bit more advanced and interesting than she had been aware of. She had known about tin as a metal of course. But she hadn’t gone this deep into tin knowledge before. Her decision to keep a separate notebook per metal made even more sense to her now. There could still be many more things than met the eye to tin, and there could still be many things to document about it.

And it might be the same with other metals, she thought. The research information could become extensive.

...

[Ornea]

THE RESEARCH CONTINUES

After using the sand to dry the text, she resumed the writing, with new ink in the quill once again.

“Tin” she wrote. “Tin is very easy to work with and you can even describe it as “spreadable” when it’s heated up. Glass smiths can use molten tin to get a flawlessly flat bed for making glass panes. Tin melts at low temperature, so it can’t be for baking molds or other tools that will be exposed to heat. It can be shaped by melting and casting and then given the finish you want, but it can also be shaped cold, with a hammer and then lathed and carved into the item you want to make.”

Ornea knew this already, and it digressed from the topic of alloys, but she liked to write it anyways. But, back to the metals and alloys ! She dipped the quill in new ink and continued.

"Tin" she wrote. “Tin is used in several kind of alloys and it would be a lie to say this is easy to sort out. There has been some experimentations done by various metalsmiths who have been mixing metals, but much remains to understand about alloys. They are man-made materials. I think they would need to be studied over a longer period of time in order to find out their true properties.

It’s easy to find out the color and how hard or easy it seems to melt, but it’s far harder to find out the inner strengths and weaknesses of alloys. The alloy we know most about is bronze, which exists in a number of different variations for different ends, and mainly consists of copper to which tin has been added.

Oddly, these two soft metals becomes the much harder metal bronze when they are blended to an alloy. How can it be that the sum of two of the softest metals can become harder than it’s parts? In order to understand this better I think continued studies will be needed, about tin, copper and bronze and about other metals as well.”

She had reached the end of the paper she has used as source for the research. She was about to put it down for good, when she realized there were a few more sentences, written in the margin at the side of the text and perpendicular to it. With a sigh she turned the paper a bit and started to figure out what it was about.

It’s Twilight over Lhavit. This is the time when Syna has gone down and Leth hasn’t risen yet, and the stars aren’t visible on the sky. This is the darkness in between the night and day, the time no deity has claimed, a godless and forgotten time where evil thrives among the shadows. And so I too became nothing else than a shadow among shadows, like we all are now. Here I am, continuing my work, in the only way left to me. Will we ever be free again, or are we all doomed?

Edward speaks of hope and resistance, but for how long will he be able to continue? Twilight reigns. All looks bleak. I’m gloomy today and hope seems to be just an impossible dream. Magic is a curse upon the world. Magic and the wizards. Oh Syna, let the towers burn and with them all the mages and their power, and all who are in league with them, all who profit from the corruption and our destruction. Erase this blight and make us free.

Ornea stared at the text, hardly able to believe what she had been reading. What was this? Oh, but already as she asked herself this question, she knew what it was. She was old enough to know about Lhavit’s past, although the Lhavitians seemed so harmonic and didn’t speak about it, and it was so easy to forget the years of darkness and despair the city had gone through.

All of it had been known to the Inarta in Wind Reach of course. The corruption, the abuse of power, the greed, the escalating poverty followed by enslavement of a huge number of Lhavitians who had been made deks. In particular, people had been enslaved by the wizards of Twilight Tower, but also by others who had been profiting on the darkest period of time in the city's history.

It wasn’t really so far back in the past either. She recalled this from her teens and early adulthood. It struck here that she might even have visited Lhavit during his time, when she had helped in Inarta trade trips. She might have been here, but not paid attention, not really noticed the situation. The thought was unsettling. Could she really have been that blind and ignorant, that unaware?

And Edward Lucis? What had been his role during this period of time? She had never wondered about this before. Now she couldn’t avoid it. Feeling shaken she read the words again. At the end of the text somebody had written a name. It was as hard to read as the rest of the notes, but it looked like Saverne Rodine.

...

[Ornea]

ORNEA FINISHES THE TIN RESEARCH

Ornea had to finish her work task though. Still thoughtful, she used the sand again. She thought about what she had written. It intrigued her. Now when she had started to investigate into the topic of alloys in depth it occurred to her that very many different mixes of metals would be possible to create.

But just creating alloys at random was actually the easy thing. The hard thing would be to find out what kind of properties they had, what each metal brought to the mix and what the alloys were good for. An enormous blank space of lacking knowledge seemed to open in front of her. What would happen if she mixed ... no, this was too much to deal with right now. She was going to get more notebooks first and investigate more about all the metals. In depth! She had a feeling the topic was huge.

After thinking a bit more she decided to take the work a step further, and extract information from her notes to make a list. This way it would be easier to add more information later on if new things turned up she figured. She wanted to try this idea, so she took the quill again and resumed the writing.

Ornea was getting a bit tried by now, and had to write very carefully in order to not make fact mistakes and also keep her handwriting good enough, while she transformed the information from running text to a list. She focused on the task and wrote patiently, line by line, taking care to check the details all the time.

Tin: A white metal which looks like silver when it’s polished
Tin: Can be polished to high shine and is beautiful to look at
Tin: Not cheap, but much more affordable than silver; “The silver of the poor”

Tin: Used for decorative items like candlesticks, lanterns, small boxes and more
Tin: Used for beautiful cutlery, goblets, trays, plates, saucers and mugs
Tin: Used for decorations on items and clothing and for jewellery
Tin: Used for small art items, toys and in gadgeteering
Tin: Used in combinations with other metals, to make alloys
Tin: Used in molten form makes a perfectly flat bed for casting glass panes
Tin: Bad for ends that require strong and enduring metal parts

Tin: Can easily be shaped into a multitude of forms; endless possibilities
Tin: Can be shaped into tin thread and thin sheets
Tin: Can be shaped to cast items by melting and casting
Tin: Can be shaped by lathering and carving

Tin: A very soft metal, malleable as hard clay
Tin: Melts at low temperature
Tin: Doesn’t corrode in air
Tin: Doesn’t corrode in water
Tin: The tin “screams” when it’s bent
Tin: Goes grey if it’s exposed to strong cold, “tin pest”
Tin: Can be used to coat items made of other metals to protect them from corrosion
Tin: Can be destroyed by acids and other strong chemicals

Tin: Can be found in tin ore and in clay that contains tin
Tin: Adding coal to molten ore or clay creates a chemical reaction and tin can be extracted.

Tin: A natural alloy due to impurities, mostly a small amount of copper
Tin: Tin alloys are made by adding small amounts of copper or lead
Tin: With 15% copper added it becomes a stronger and useful tin alloy
Tin: With some lead added to the tin alloy it gets a blue color
Tin: Is added to copper to make the metal alloy named bronze
Tin: Although tin and copper both are soft metals, bronze is hard

When she was done with the list and had checked several time that she had everything correct she repeated the usual procedure with the sand and waited for the ink to dry. Then she blew away the sand carefully.

To own her surprise she found that it was only a half bell to noon rest. She had been so absorbed in her work that she hadn’t thought of the time. Now she’d better hurry up if she wanted to speak with Edward before it was time for a break and lunch.

Ornea put the now used sheet of paper to the side and looked at the box with the pile of pergaments, papers, scraps, notebooks and palimpsests. She hoped it would contain more things of interest to her and Edward. Time would tell. For now the important thing was to separate the already used information there from the things that still remained to work through.

She fetched a fresh parchment sheet of very cheap quality they used for folders, folded it neatly on the middle, wrote “Tin and Tin Alloy’s, Used Documents” on it and organized the used paper inside. Then she put the folder on top of the pile in the flat box and carried it back to it’s place on the shelf. No need to create more disorder in this somewhat sloppy library!

She put a lid on the ink bottle and placed the quill in the holder. Then she took the notebook and looked at the result of her research. Not bad, even if this had been at a fairly basic level. Ornea didn’t feel like a top scientist exactly, she knew she wasn’t, but she still hoped Edward Lucis would like her results.

She was going to speak with Edward at once!

Continues in Metallurgy research plan

...

[Neologism]

Skills:

Observation +4
Writing +4
Copying +1
Intelligence +5
Organization +2
Planning +1

Lores:

Tin: Not cheap, but much more affordable than silver
Tin: Used in combinations with other metals, to make alloys
Tin: Used in molten form makes a perfectly flat bed for casting glass panes
Tin: Can easily be shaped
Tin: A very soft metal, malleable as hard clay
Tin: Melts at low temperature
Tin: Doesn’t corrode in air or water
Tin: A natural alloy due to impurities
Tin: Popular element to use in alloys
Tin: Turns blue when mixed with lead
Tin: Is added to copper to make bronze

Notes: Don't forget to edit your post in the request thread as 'Graded' and pm me if you have any concerns.