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Page 2 Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 Charles Stanley, Toolmaker These notes were put together in September 2002, by Jean Hall (nee Stanley). There were many knobs at all angles and layers on it, all with thousandths of an inch engraved around their collars. Dad would trial the pieces sometimes in his sandboxes, and I can remember seeing all the products with extra bits attached where the molten metal had gone up air vents and things. It still meant a lot of hand finishing had to be done with the toys. The whole process fascinated me. Dad used to harden the dies by bringing them inside and putting them on Mum's stove. He would put them on the hot element and just stand there turning them and moving them around for some time. There would be a slight haze and smell during the process! Dad had an extensive workshop with milling machines, various lathes, a forge, compressor and all manner of things to do with woodwork, too. He had a slatted board walk for the metallic 'curls' to fall through as he worked the lathe. He made all the dies for his gold cast signet rings , also the dies for tie pins and lockets he manufactured. I can still remember the beautiful molten gold, all pink and pearly looking in his crucible. He had several recipes where he mixed the copper and silver with it for rose gold. Each type of object had various mixtures as pure gold is too soft. He also had his hand engraving clamp and hand tools on a special work bench. Its base was made like an indented wooden bowl, lined with leather. A chromed ball swivelled in it , when moved by hand, as it had a stalked head ( like a mushroom upside down, with a clamp on it). He later made some hand held ones which I still have. Kenny Blair of Kennedy Jewellers bought them from him. Kenny said to me, years later, that similar tools had just come on to the market from Switzerland, although Dad had made them 40 years before their time. The style of the modern ones were practically identical to Dad's. Dad had a big Norton swing press which was huge. It had a big cross bar that held a 28 pound cast ball on one side and a handle on the other. The sheet metal was slid on to the flat bed and when the handle was swung around to the left, the worm drive in the centre would come down through the ram guides, and when it reached the dies in the die clamps under the bed.....then the mudguards, tiepins, or whatever, would be pressed out and fall into the box underneath. He made the chromed air vent type car bonnet decorations, in the 1950s. These vents were chromed after they had been stamped and formed. Silver tea services were created this way too, which he made big dies for. He made big precision rollers ( which Kenny still has ) that rolled gold, thinner and thinner. These rollers stood about four feet high and weighed a ton. He had to roll the gold first though; I can remember seeing it getting longer and longer as it grew along the drive from his shed as he re-rolled it time and again. It was then cut into lengths and put under the bench as nobody would recognise it to be gold from the look of it then. Only when it had been put through an acid dip and was polished up on the buffer, with jeweller's rub, did it come to life. Charles Stanley, my Dad also made the dies for 'The Greedy Nigger Boy' money box, the Crocodile nut cracker and various items for bakerlite, an early form of plastic. This was during the 1940's, while he was working as a tool and die maker for H.C. Urlwins of Christchurch (now PDL).
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