Building a Grey Seal: Road Trip!

We finally found a couple of consecutive uncommitted days to drive up to Rhode Island to pick up the keel ballast. We rented a "cargo van" with a 10 foot bed for the trip, since my trailer is not yet ready, and headed north. Providence, RI is about four and a half or five hours drive, but can be much longer, depending on whether traffic conditions through the New York City vicinity are horrendous or merely horrible. We lucked out and only had horrible, so we reached the foundry at about 1:30 in the afternoon.

I. Broomfield and Son, Inc is about the last lead foundry in the eastern US -- maybe in the whole US, specializing in pouring production and custom sail boat keel ballasts. They did a great job on the ballast for a 34 foot centerboard catboat that was built at the Workshop on the Water at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia (ISM,) a few years ago, and thus came highly recommended. They most definitely did not disappoint.

My wife and I got to meet all the people at Broomfield, including Michele, with whom I have had multiple phone conversations and exchanged many e-mails in the process of getting to this point. Also, Tom, who actually cast my ballast, and Shannon, who did a beautiful job of grinding it. David Broomfield, the third generation of his family to operate the foundry, was extremely gracious and gave us a tour of the place. Broomfield and Son is a wonderful old family manufacturing business, of the kind that used to be common in the US, but today, unfortunately, are all too rare.

We began by loading up the ballast in our rented truck, with the help of Tom and his forklift. In the photos below, you can see the eyebolts embedded into the casting to facilitate lifting. They will be taken out with a bar later on.

Here's the ballast ready to be lifted into the truck. A beautiful piece of work by real craftsmen.

Tom moves the forklift into position

Dave Broomfield looks on

Thank you Dave! It looks great. Shame it has to go underwater.

I would prefer if this particular load didn't shift.

Here's Tom who took my pattern and made the casting.

Once we were loaded up, Dave took us on a walk through the shop. They smelt their own lead from scrap of various types. Surprisingly (to me) the lead balancing weights which everyone thinks of as a primary source of lead, make up a small part of their base. Dave explained that the content is variable and sorting is time consuming, and increasingly lead is not actually used in balancing weights due to environmental concerns.

The heart of the operation is the melting furnace.

The melting furnace is a huge cauldron which sits over a below-floor heat source. Once melted, the lead is pumped out of the cauldron, through pipes and into molds. Much of the work is production, for sailboat manufacturers like Sabre Yatch, Hunter, Pearson, Alden, and Morris. A smaller amount is custom work like my job. At this time, Broomfield and Son is still doing a lot of replacement keel work for boats damaged by our east coast storm, Sandy last year.

A mold for a production keel.

One of the many production keels awaiting delivery.

Piles of scrap lead awaiting smelting.

There are a few automotive balancing weights in the inventory.

The following day, we headed south to drop the ballast off at the ISM, where the boatshop crew has been kind enough to offer me assistance in installing it in the boat. Jeff was on hand with his forklift -- you can't do much with 1200 pounds of lead without a forklift.