Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Several weeks ago, Steve Stenstrom offered to give us a quick workshop on metal cleaning and preservation techniques. Our best guess is that we have a bout 100 metal items to clean — most are from the African American Museum of Iowa. We really needed his assistance, took him up on his offer, and decided to hold a metal cleaning party.

On Tuesday, Caitlin set up the Oakdale storage room with tables, covered with plastic, and worklights. She also swept out the room and made it look presentable–we have been taking pictures of each item out there and finishing the inventory, so we had a few things to tidy. I was to gather the tools and cleaning items that we might need and bring them out to Oakdale.

Bryan Stusse and I met Steve out at Oakdale Hall around 10:00AM so we could set up the tools and go through items with him. While Nancy and I talked to Steve, Caitlin and Bryan went to meet Leigh Ann Randak, Johnson County Historical Society curator, in order to help her navigate the Oakdale maze.

After we had settled in, Steve gave us an intro lecture, discussing briefly the problems with alloy and non-alloy metals, a little background in metal manufacture, basic tools and solutions for removing corrosion, and then tried to convince Nancy to set up an electrolysis bath in the lab for some of the items. She wasn’t convinced.

Each of us selected a metal object to work on. At the end of the day we had two horse shoes and a knife cleaned and two other items partially cleaned. Our original intent was to start cleaning metal in the conservation lab. After a day of scraping, flaking, sanding rust and other debris from the metal, we decided this particular task is too dirty for the lab and will continue our work out at Oakdale.

We still need to learn how to finish the cleaned metal object to protect it from contaminates. Steve offered to come back another day. His offer was gratefully accepted.

The three photos on the left are courtesy George McCrory, University of Iowa News Service.