#33 Cast Iron Restoration: george Brown House

One of our Fathers of Confederation and Globe newpaper founder, George Brown, built his home in Toronto in 1874. It was common for ships travelling back to Canada after delivering loads of timber to return with holds weighted down with cast iron objects.  It does imply here, though, that Brown had a hand in designing the fence, so perhaps this was locally made, though I suspect that the castings were somewhat more sophisticated than those produced in most of the area foundries.

In the late 1980's I was commissioned to restore the fence, working from the well-rusted and pitted remains of the various bits of the fence. Some sections, perhaps inches across, were missing altogether.

It was my job to figure out how the fence was made in the first place, where the parts came together, and how they were cast. 

That heavy rope motif top rail was hollow to incorporate a long pipe that supported the various panels. It's pretty hard to weld cast iron, especially if you're a 19th century blacksmith. The original castings were quite thin, leading me to think that these were cast with some skill. The thin parts, of course, were the area most rusted and broken.

This is the curly decoration on top of the posts. This arrived in about 4 pieces. One piece from the original is shown here. I roughly assembled what I had, took moulds off these parts, and added carving to fill in the blanks. To make this work in the foundry, I had to produce "tooling", the grey board shown. This gets placed in a metal box, and sand is rammed around the pattern to form a mould into which molten iron can be poured.

Here's another view of the restored fence. Each panel consists of the main panel, top finials, the rope motif top rail, and a cap for the  bottom rail. There are pipes running along top and bottom, hidden inside the castings. The whole thing is bolted together.

This is the panel tooling in progress. I would have started by filling in some of the surface pits with clay, then taking moulds off both sides of the surviving iron panel. The mould would have projecting bumps where the iron surface was pitted. I would have spent hours sanding these bumps off, effectively rebuilding the surface. When I took copies out of the moulds, I would further refine the surface to get pretty close to where the casting started out 110 years ago.

Here is a piece of the main post, perhaps already somewhat cleaned up. Occasionally, on restoration projects, I can slather on a plastic filler and sand it smooth. Other times I have to return original pieces untouched. Or appear to be untouched.

Here is half of the post pattern. I've smoothed the surface and added 'prints' top and bottom. To make the post a hollow cylinder I have to generate a separate box that creates a sand form that fills the interior of the casting. Those 'prints' support the sand form, the Core, in the main mould.

There are often long discussions that accompany a project like this. We have to figure out how to hold the whole thing together, often trying to improve on the original structure. We have to make the patterns work in the foundry. On a job this big, there are some dozens of small pieces to be cast, so I might be asked to make a tool that makes multiples of the part to keep the cost down. 

It's fun to be part of this kind of effort, connecting, in a way, with the original builder and foundry guys, making something that might extend the life of this bit of history for another century or so.