A good day out...

  Today, the local blacksmithing group was meeting at a gentleman's shop over on the Gulf Coast.  Before I go any further, a bit of history on the area.

  The town I went to is Tarpon Springs, Florida.  This area was mostly populated by Greek immigrants around 1900.  The brought much of their culture with them as well as one of their occupations, sponge diving.  Sponge harvesting is still one of the big businesses in the area.

  The gentleman's shop we went to makes traditional sponge diving helmets.  These are the large helmets often associated with underwater salvage or other heavy work.  For examples, visit this site.  http://www.divingheritage.com/lerioskern.htm  This is the shop that we went to.

  He gave a great presentation.  Very friendly individual and very open the sharing his knowledge.  And his shop was full of many great antique tools.

  As the day was winding down, he was talking about dredging part of the ocean out next to his shop.  Part of the dredging brought up a large amount of rusty metal bars.  When I finally got a closer look, I had a surprise.  It was real wrought iron and a lot of it.  Some of asked if he would mind if we took it.  He had no problem and I ended up with the lion's share of it.  I probably have about 50' of 1 1/2" by 1/2" wrought iron.  A few spots are heavily rusted but since it is wrought iron it will be easy to fold it back on itself and weld it together to thicken it back up...

  Anyway, a few good day.  Lot of neat things and some free wrought iron.

  On another note, over the past few weeks I have been thinking about the problems I have been having in making any real progress on the clock over the past few months.  I think the real problem is that I have been working on the clock at demos.  I tend to rush things and mess them up.  So, for the foreseeable future, I am only going to work on the clock at home when no one is watching.