Completed Magma and metalsmithing

[Ornea]

...

Magma and metalsmithing
Timestamp: 78 Summer 515 AV
Location: Wind Reach

NOTHING COMPARES

It wasn’t so fair of Ornea to compare the young Wind Reach glasswork master Corvin Astil with the master gadgeteer of Lhavit, Edward Lucis. But she did. And nothing compared, nothing compared to the old gadgeteer.

She was commissioned with metalsmithing and would use a furnace in the Arms Gallery, located in Corvins Astil's glasswork workshop area; the reason for this co-location was to make maximal use of the magma. How this sharing of the space and production resources would work out in practice remained to be seen.

Corvin wasn’t her employer, just a colleague. She was competent at her work , and they were both working for the city, and they were both avora. This didn’t stop Corvin from strutting foolishly like he thought he was her boss. Well. She was sure he was intelligent and skilled at his profession. But when it came to dealing with other people he was an immature, incompetent goof, in Ornea’s opionion.

She listened without feeling impressed, while Corvin babbled a whole lot about some very simple things, like he loved listening to his own voice and also was unable to keep to the essentials. He seemed to like limelight, to say the least, and acted like it was important to him to get to prance and show off with his mastery. Ornea silently wondered if that was his whole purpose with being professional at all; show off, prance around, babble and grandstand big time, and have no limit to his admiration of himself.

Ornea found him boring. She could already see that he was master of babbling, but she doubted he would achieve any work results. He seemed to be that kind of person who could only get things done when it was for his own self-centered goals and his own crafting. She bet he was crafting a lot for himself, and sort of just pretending to serve the city, when he had to do it in order to not be demoted.

She didn’t like him.

In comparison to Edward Lucis back in Lhavit, Corvin Astil was a total nobody. Her conclusion was that the best for now was to ignore this babbling cock-chicken she didn’t need for anything at all, and focus on her own work.

Ornea had been commissioned with making lanterns. She studied the work order and read it again, observing every detail in it to make sure she knew exactly what it was about. As far as she could see, the task wasn’t specific; it was mostly just "make lanterns".

Ornea showed the work order to Corvin Astil in order to check up if there were any more details she needed to know. Corvin seemed reluctant to do this simple little task that was actually work, and not about him showing off and being admired. But after meeting Ornea's intimidating gaze, he decided to read it after all, and said that no, there weren’t anything more to it. Just a normal lantern job she could do any way she wanted to do it. Ornea took it she was free to design and craft the lanterns any way she liked, as long as she got the job done.

Now when Corvin had done something of use, however minor, instead of just bragging impotently, she felt a little bit more approving of him. If he didn't cuckoo too much and had the good judgement to not mess with her, they might get along !

...

[Ornea]

...

PLANNING THE JOB

Luckily she was a competent metalsmith and had no trouble doing the more detailed design herself. In the relatively less hot part of the work area, she found a desk with tools for drawing and painting, parchment and paper. Perfect! This meant she could start to work at the design at once. Taking it for granted that she had access to this desk and it’s equipment, Ornea pulled a stool to the desk, had a seat and started the work. She took an empty parchment and spread it out on top of the desk, putting small beautiful lumps of glass as weights on the corners of it, in order to keep it in place. Wonderful. It was time to start drawing.

Before she actually drew something for real she was however going to think a bit, so she also took a small scrap of parchment that had already been used for some sketching, but saved so the back side of it could be used too. She opened a small bottle of ink, took a quill, dipped it in the ink and drew a few doodles, just to try out the quill.

Now ... she started to think of metals and their properties and what she could do. Tin could be a suitable material for the lantern crafting of today, as it didn’t take much heating, was easy to shape and could make for quick production of a number of lanterns. In her thoughts she recalled what she knew about this metal. It was a great deal. She had researched it thoroughly back in Lhavit.

This metal was malleable as clay. There was nearly no limit to what she could create with it. But this was a city commission and nobody would thank her for spending the whole day on one single and very artistic lantern. Volume was the key word here. Lanterns, not one lantern. She would need to settle for a shape that was efficient for function but also for the production. This didn’t mean she was going to skip the artistic part of the design, but she needed to be practical.

So ... she settled for a principle. She was going to melt the tin and pour it in one of the flat molds glassblowers used when they made glass panes; molten tin was in fact often used a bed for high quality glasspanes in order to make them totally even. She was however going to use relatively smaller molds. Then she would let the metal cool down and become solid again. This done, she would take the flat tin panes and hammer them thinner until they were the size she would need to make the lanterns. Once she had those thinner, hammered pieces of metal, she would hammer them more, now in order to bend them to cylinder form, and to punch decorative patterns of holes in the metal.

When she was done with the planning for now, she proceeded to draw scale small sketches. She was far from ready to start the metalwork yet. There was a lot of things to prepare first. But she didn’t need to tend to the furnaces and feed them with fuel, like it had been in Lhavit. The furnaces in Wind Reach used the heat of earth itself, the magma under earth providing them with the endless “fuel” that enabled the city to be the foremost provider of glass in the whole world.

...

[Ornea]

...

MAKING A MODEL - Step 1

Ornea decided to proceed to making a full scale parcment model of the lantern to be. She started by rummaging through an assortment of circular molds she found in the workshop. After comparing them she settled for what she found an appropriate size for the bottom of the lantern. She took this mold, put it on the paper and used it as template for making a perfect circle. After dipping the quill in ink she moved it slowly around the mold, and made the drawing. The result was a nice circle that looked very accurate.

Ornea felt satisfied with herself, but it wouldn't last for long. Corvin had turned up to see what she was doing and how she was going about it. He snickered and asked her why she hadn't used the pair of compasses to make the circle. Her methods didn't come off as too professional to him, he said.

What little appreciation she had felt for the man faded away. "I wanted this exact size" she said. "Because I will use this mold. It would just have been extra work to bother with compasses." Truth was, Ornea hadn't thought of using the compasses, but she wasn't going to admit it.

"You can't just walk in here and use molds and act like you own the place" said Corvin. His voice had taken on what Ornea considered a snobbish and uppity tone. "This desk is mine. You are using my parchments and my ink and drawing tools, and not in a skilled way. I really wish you would ask me before you rush away and do a lot of things."

"I'm sure the city will pay for the materials for commissioned work just as usual" said Ornea coldly. "I'm not doing personal crafting here. It's a city work order. I'm pretty sure I'm entitled to use the materials and tools I need for it. Or did you mean all the things here are only available for your own personal crafting and not for the city's needs? In that case, where do you keep the things that are for commissioned work? You'd better show me, and these materials and tools has better be of as good quality as what you use for your own crafting, or it would seem suspect!"

Corvin's face took on a slightly more rose color than could be explained by the normal heat in the location. "Are you implying that I cheat ?"

"Are you implying that I can't use the materials and tools here for a city work order I'm commissioned with, because everything here is your private property?"

Collectivism was the heart of Inartan culture. Private property, personal ownership, exclusive rights ... this could exist, but it wasn't something people would want to strut with too much, not in Mount Skyinarta. It could be seen as giving priority to ones own interests and benefits instead of thinking of the Inarta nation.

"It's not private property exactly". Resentful was only the first name of how Corvins voice sounded now. "But I'm responsible for how it's being used. We can't waste city property on things that aren't guaranteed to pay off! "

Ornea had one of her less polite moments and told him to cuckoo off, because she was working and he was in the way. She slammed her chosen circular mold down on the table and went to have a look at the rectangular ones. She would need one of them to make the cylinders. Corvin Astil walked away again. If this was because he felt intimidated or just because work beckoned was actually unknown to her. But as she saw it, she had intimidated him successfully, and she felt content with herself. She had won this argument.

...

[Ornea]

...

MAKING A MODEL - Step 2

Still feeling a bit annoyed after the stupid little intermezzo with the even more stupid little Corvin, Ornea found a few rectangular pane molds that seemed to be possible to use for the circular body of the lantern.

She put them on the desk and after looking around a bit she found a leather strap she used to measure the circumference of the mold she was going to use for the bottom plate. She folded the strap to make a mark on and then she used it to measure the molds, in order to find out which of them was best suited for her ends.

Unfortunately Corvin Astil was back to comment on her methods again.

"Why aren't you using measuring tape and yardstick ?" he asked, sounding like he had never seen such incompetence before in his whole life. "Are you totally unfamiliar with normal basic crafting tools? I was told you are a competent metalsmith and ..."

Ornea interrupted him, looking up from her work.

"Yes, I happen to be competent" she said, giving him what some people called eagle eyes. This was a menacing gaze indeed and although Corvin didn't step back, she could see that he actually vinced a little bit, which he quickly concealed. "And I can tell you that I have definitely worked with far more expert people than you! So can you please go and mind your own business now. I have work to do."

"I was only trying to help you". Corvin shrugged. "Well. Go on and do it your way. Just don't count on me to sort out the mess later on."

He walked away again, and Ornea looked after him, fuming, but set on not losing more time on him. She was going to use a mold somewhat shorter than than the circumference of the bottom and hammer the tin to the exact dimensions she needed, once she had made the metal plate. She put the best of the molds beside the bottom plate mold, and returned the others to the pile where she had found them.

After this is was time to draw again. Unlike the mold, the rectangle she drew on the parcment was somewhat longer than the circurmference of the bottom, as she was going to need this extra lenght for the construction of the model. She dipped the quill i the ink and drew the lines carefully, using a ruler now, in order to get them exactly right. The result was a perfect rectangle.

There was small knife along the tools and now she took it and carefully cut out the circle and the rectangle she had drawn on the parchment. This done, she put the short ends of the parchment rectangle together in order to make a cylinder of it, fitted it exactly to the bottom circle and used some glue from a jar on the work desk to assemble it. She had some experience in simple gadgeteering and it helped her now, when she had to think of shapes and volumes and how to make her own design, figure out the parts and fit them together.

There ... she had a cylinder with a bottom now, made of parchment. Nice, but she felt something was missing. It would come in handy with a top piece and a handle, wouldn't it?

...

[Ornea]

...

MAKING A MODEL - Step 3

She would need to make a flat piece of metal that could be shaped to the form of a cone. In the past, Ornea would perhaps have kept to a simpler design, like the cube formed lantern she had used when she had been clearing tunnels. But she found herself more ambitious these days and wanted to do a job with more challenge. Her insights in logical thinking and her ability to solve design tasks had been in demand at Lucis in Lhavit and the firms strife for high quality had a lasting impact on her. Working with Edward Lucis and sharing his innovative thinking and many ideas had affected her a lot. She found it interesting and fun to solve complicated things. She observed this about herself while she studied the lantern model. This was just like gadgeteering, with the thinking, drawing, and construction of models.

A bigger circle she thought to herself. Yes. Make a bigger circle form and then cut out part of it and put the straight edges together. This way she would make a cone. She got to her feet in order to fetch a bigger circular form and use it as template, when she saw Corvin Astil come walking her way again. She wasn't going to admit to Corvin that she cared about his comments, but to be honest she did, and she didn't want to hear anything more about how she wasn't using the pair of compasses.

She grabbed the compasses and checked quickly that the small piece of drawing charcoals was in place. The tool was ready to use. Now she was going to show that cuckoo-chick that she was able to use it. She measured the compasses against the circular bottom of the model and settled for a size. The only important thing right now was to make the new circle bigger than the first one. She figured she was going to experiment and find the measures she wanted by trying them out in practice.

Corvin had arrived. He watched wile Ornea drew her circle by putting the sharpened metal edge of one of them in the parchment and move the other around it, drawing a perfect circular form. There. She had done it.

She took the ruler and put it in place, and after dipping the quill in the ink she drew a fine straight line from the periphery of the circle form to the small mark in the middle where the compasses had pierced the parchment. And then she cut along the line, and started to move the edged in order to form a the cone she wanted. This showed her that she could make the form higher or flatter and she tested this back and forth, holding it on top of the model to see how it would look.

Corvin Astil started to laugh out loud. " You really don't have the slightest idea about how to calculate the form of the pieces you need" he said.

"This isn't mathematics". Ornea settled for the size she wanted for the cone and made marks with the quill so she would see where to cut next. "Don't you have your own work to take care of?"

The glassworker shrugged. "I'm waiting for things to get ready for next step." He took a step closer to the desk. "What is it then? Parchment handicraft?" He sounded amused.

Ornea drew an new line at the place she had marked and then she cut out a segment of the circle. Now the shape was similar to a round cake somebody had taken a piece of. She also cut it a bit around the perimeter in order to it to the upper part of the parchment cylinder that was the body of the lantern model. She put a very small amount of glue on the edges and put in on the top of the model. There not bad, It looked like a small hat. She would fasten a handle at the top of it, later, when she crafted, but this wasn't anything she needed to draw; she would just use wire for it.

This done she put the model on the desk and turned to Corvin Astil. "I want to make one thing clear" she said in the blunt way of an Inarta who isn't going to put up with more crap from someone of same caste. "I'm an avora, just like you. So don't come here and behave like you think you're an endal. I don't want to be disturbed in my work all the time !"

She slammed her fist into the table to emphasize her words. And it sure did. At first she was totally stunned by the effect; the rumbling sound was way higher than she had been prepared for, and it was like the whole place started to shake slightly. The parchment model fell from the table and Corvin Astil's glassware rattled on the shelves.

For a tick or two, they stared at each other in disbelief.

...

[Ornea]

...

TREMOR

A minor tremor shook the city this day, and with it the workplace area Ornea and Corvin were standing in. The first shock faded and was replaced by a new and bigger shock when she understood that the rumble was the voice of the earth, and came from the magma deep down under their feet; a power bigger than most other things in the whole world. In comparison the two people in the workshop were just like a couple of ants on a straw, insignificant, invisible to the immense greater power that shook them. They were reminded about how fragile they were and how easily their lives could be ended.

Where could they go in case this was the start of a major earth quake? Ornea realized she didn't know. The Inarta were a tough people, and used to endure many hardships. But if the mountain that was their home would turn against them and threaten their lives, if they had to leave Skyinarta, what would become of them, and of the wind eagles ?

Ornea had never before asked herself these questions.

Not even when she had been cleaning up in the tunnels and seen all the damage from the quakes earlier in the summer had she thought this far. She had been too busy thinking of the work and her own issues, and the findings he had done in the storage room. But now the scenario of a disaster beyond belief ran through her mind at lightning speed. What if the proud Inarta people were going to lose their city and become a homeless people in exile, roaming this world not like noble eagles, but like a flock of rugged scavengers just trying to survive?

Ivak, Ivak, Ivak, Ivak ... the rumble of the earth awoke her memory of how they all had stood chanting the gods name on the day when he had been freed and the djed storm had rocked the world. Ivak, Ivak, Ivak, Ivak! Where was he now, the god, when the burning innards of the earth under Mount Skyinarta was in upheaval and the people who had chanted his name were shaken like ants on a straw? In her overgiving delirium of the past, she had tought she had seen him; in the cave behind the avalance, and in the hallucinations that had followed. If this had been real, or just overgiving delusions, was impossible for her to say, but in case it really had happened there was no mark on her body to prove it.

The illusion or reality of a god had visited her and passed her by without leaving a visible mark on her body, but the memory was imprinted on her mind.

And right now it had drawn her into one more of her lapses and made her float away on a mix of reality and dreamlike thoughts, memories and imaginations. She was torn out of it abruptly, when Corvin Astil grabbed her arm and told her to not panic, because this didn't seem like a big quake, just a small tremor. Some glassware had been crushed and there was a lot of commotion and upset people of course, but he thought the tremor was already calming down.

...

[Ornea]

...

THE WORK MUST GO ON


The earth stopped shaking again, like it had looked at them and considered to toss them around like the insignificant little ants they were, and send them swimming in a final hot river of lava, but hadn’t found them worth bothering with.

Ornea and Corvin Astil looked at each other, none of them up for continuing the kind of hostile conversation that had been interrupted. They were silent, and they just stood, and in this moment of silence and stillness their gazes met.

“I need to check on the glass”.

Corvin turned and went over to the oven where he had melting glass in progress and left Ornea to her own devices. She picked up the parchment model from the floor and then she continued with her work. This was all they could do right now.

She calculated the amount of metal she would need; she was going to make an alloy of the kind she had learnt more about during her metallurgy studies at Lucis.

Of one hundred bars of metal, 15 needed to be copper and the remaining 85 bars would be tin. This was called a tin alloy with 15 percent of copper, a stronger kind of tin, though still easy to work with. But she wasn’t going to use one hundred metal bars; she would make a reasonably big batch of the alloy, but that big. So she needed to calculate a bit.

Mathematics wasn’t her strong suit, and in Lucis she would have used the very practical balance.Here she had no other choice than doing the maths. She started by dividing the figures with ten to make the batch ten times smaller. Out of then metal bars she would need 8 and one half bar of tin and 1 and a half bar of copper. After thinking a bit she doubled this. She was going to use seventeen bars of tin and three bars of copper, and of this she would make twenty bars of alloy.

The calculations done, she went to fetch the metal, put it in a melting pot in a small furnace well suited for the end. It wouldn’t take so long time to melt the metal and make the alloy, but it would also need to solidify before she could continue. She fetched the bar molds she needed and put them in a neatly organized row near the furnace. In a while she was going to make the alloy bars.

She waited, and studied her parchment model.

Corvin came back from his check on the glass. “The glass isn’t ready yet” he announced. “How’s it going with the metal?”

Ornea looked up. It didn’t feel so disturbing to have Corvin there anymore. It was better than being alone. The tremor had somehow changed the atmosphere. It was good to have a colleague. She smiled faintly at him. There wasn’t so much to say about it, but she told him she was waiting too. Simple words, nothing special, but it still felt like they were getting along a lot better.

She didn’t know why, but she didn’t question it. If felt like the tremor had "shaken them together".

The two crafters sat for a while in the heat of the furnace area, waiting for their materials to melt, and they spoke a bit, and thought about the items they were planning to craft.

...

[Ornea]

...

THE ALLOY

Ornea checked on the metal. Copper and tin had molten and blended to a new and other metal, an alloy. Ornea spent a tick or two marveling over how two materials could be fused to a new material with other properties. But she didn’t dwell on it. It was time to make the alloy bars, so she pulled on gauntlets, got the melting pot out of the heat and started to pour the metal into the bar molds. She poured with the accuracy of a competent metalsmith; it was a long time since she had been a novice. Although she had to focus on doing the job properly she didn’t do any mistakes. It was a challenge to get the alloy bars exactly the same size and she put in effort at doing all she could to achieve this. She knew there would still be small differences, but she tried to minimize those.

When she had poured the alloy and all the molds were full, there was nothing more she could do until they had solidified. Casting was like this. There were periods of waiting time. And there would be a second round of casting to do once she would use the alloy bars to make the lantern parts. It wasn’t possible to work faster. And after this, she would continue to the hammering ... in short, this wasn’t a job for very impatient people and it wasn’t a job for those who weren’t able to imagine a result that they would need to work at step for step.

Corvin Astil was blowing glass now. She watched from a distance, didn’t want to risk to disturb him in case it was something complicated he was doing. Perhaps she would ask later. She would always miss Edward Lucis, but there was no meaning with comparing the young glass artisan with the old gadgeteer. Now when they had spoken and started to learn to know each other, it felt like they were a team, however temporary, and despite working with different crafts. It would maybe not be so bad to work in the same workspace.

She gathered a bunch of new molds, circular and rectangular, the sizes she had decided on when she had made the model. It went without saying that the model was just an idea and in practice each lantern would be unique. The idea of trying to craft identical items had never even been considered by Ornea. There was no such thing as producing standardized things. But a model could be used as a starting point.

Ornea had learnt to think this way in Lucis, where her knowledge about metalwork and taken a turn towards gadgeteering and turned into something else than it had been before; a new kind of knowledge, with other properties than what she had known before.

When the alloy was ready for it, she would go on to the next casting. And in the days to come she would craft on. She would make lanterns for a city where she didn’t know for how long time they would need light at all. She would craft them because it was her duty, whether they would be of use or not, to provide her people with what they needed.

...

[Ornea]

Self-Graded 2017

Skills
Planning+1
Drawing+1
Metalsmithing+4
Mathemtics +1

Lores
Corvin Astil
The volcanic activity in Wind Reach in fall 515 AV.