Timeless Craftsmanship of Bronze Oarlocks
After 26 years of rowing, I have become partial to a bronze oarlock made by Thomas Machine & Foundry of Marysville, Washington. It’s not the nylon oarlocks I learned to race with in college, nor is it the beefy oarlocks that have taken me across the ocean. It’s a simple oval slid over my nine-foot fir oars for my Gig Harbor Boat Works Jersey Skiff. It’s an everyday oarlock for an everyday boat that’s taken hundreds of friends on picnics, workouts, a few open water races, and even twice down the Mississippi River.
Many modern oar and oarlock set ups are squared in some way, allowing the rower to feel the flat part of the oar’s shaft lock into place on the flat bit of the oarlock. This bio feedback lets the rower know the blade is straight up and down as it is driven through the water. The round shafts of the oars inside the oval of the oarlock allowed me to develop a greater feeling of the face of the blade as I pulled it through the water. After a bit of a learning curve, I began to relish the extra sensitivity it gave me—almost as if I could feel my hand flowing through the water with each stroke.
Bronze is a soft slick metal and is self-lubricating. On the muddy waters of the Mississippi, we ate up oarlocks every 750 miles. There was no practical way to keep the oarlocks truly clean of the particulate in the water and this would wear out the oarlocks quickly. Additional lubricants seemed to attract more sand and dirt and lead to more wear. On the cleaner saltwater, they last considerably longer.
A few times I tried replacing the oval Thomas Machine & Foundry oarlocks with other brands that were round and often polished a bit shinier. Here I learned that the oval shape of the oarlock does two things. It’s a better yoke. Always seating the shaft while providing more bearing surface.
Unrelated to shape, I found that the round oarlocks often came with a more polished smooth finish. They tended to work, harden, and then shear. The inside, unlike the solid look the polished exterior suggested, revealed a porosity, essentially small bubbles in the metal that come from a poor casting. At least two brands performed this way. I’ve never broken a Thomas Machine & Foundry oarlock, the closest I’ve come is bending one when I rolled the boat while landing on a beach.
After 10,000 to 15,000 miles on the boat, I had a nice collection of worn-out oarlocks and a lot of affection for the brand. The next time I needed some, I decided I would go to the source and reached out to the Thomas Machine & Foundry website to see if I could purchase some at a bulk discount. I was told I’d need a reseller’s permit, but over the course of our email exchange, Ben Shoop, the sales manager at Thomas Machine & Co. got to know what I’d been up to with rowing and offered to send me three new pairs. He even invited me to come check out the foundry itself and told me I could bring my old oarlocks and see them melted down.
A few weeks later, I drove up to Marysville with Pat, a rowing pal from college, ocean rowing, and the Mississippi River who I knew would be just as into seeing oarlocks get forged as I was.
Inside the front door is a display of the variety of metal objects they have cast over the years. We met Ben and a few other employees in the office, and he gave us some glasses and led us into the foundry.
Just outside the office is a fancy CNC machine they now use to make their molds. Ben told me it had replaced the wood shop where molds had traditionally been made by hand. I detected a bit of nostalgia in his voice. We admired the efficient machine whizzing away before he showed us out onto the factory floor where the action remained decidedly more craftsman.
There was a large hopper full of casting sand feeding itself into four production lines. On the other end were several kiln stations. Around the floor were neat piles of metal billets, off casts of scrap, spare parts, more sand, and a large shelf with finished parts waiting for shipments. In the middle of the floor, a Sasquatch inspired figure made of metal drippings looked on at the focused yet unhurried men in long sleeves and masks walking with large heavy ladles cradled in their arms and pouring liquid aluminum into casts.
Piles of sand were lumped in at the end of each line from where they had been knocked off the castings. There was a grate in the floor where the sand was swept into. It met a conveyor belt to get sifted and reused. Though it was gritty beneath our feet, it was not as dusty, and the smell of metal reaching liquid temperatures added an incongruous feeling of sterility to the shop floor.
Ben took us to one of the crucibles and gave me a thick leather glove and invited me to drop my old oarlocks in the convection kiln the size of a pony keg. Some bronze was already melted down to a neon orange. Each patinated oarlock, scared with its miles of use, slipped into the liquid until any trace of its previous life, if any, was purely molecular.
While we waited for the crucible to reach its final pouring temperature, Ben led us to one of the hoppers where a man stood with a mold of the oarlocks. With one hand, he flipped a lever and fresh sand cascaded into the mold. He tamped it and pulled the lever again. Excess sand was wiped away, the mold squeezed tight by an electric press, and the rest of the sand blown away. The process was repeated and the two sides were joined then taken over to the waiting crucible.
Two men in denim, canvas, leather, and helmets with clear full-face masks used a small crane to raise the crucible to chest height to fill the several molds on the production line. Liquid hot metal shimmered the air around us, flames erupting as they poured the metal out. Some of it leaking through the mold hit the metal table and cement floor and briefly caught fire until Jeff, the foundry manager, wiped it to the floor with the casualness one might deal with spilled milk.
The brightness of the heat cast pale shadows under the factory’s fluorescent lights and added a Caravaggio like quality to the practiced movements of the men that appeared unafraid of this ancient alchemy they had mastered and yet aware that a single mistake might lead to a disaster.
The metal cooled invisibly, forming its latest iteration under the dark, hard-pressed sand. It was not long before it had hardened enough to be revealed. Jeff hit the mold with a hammer and the sand fell away. The fresh bronze was so bright it looked like a freshly dug up hoard of pure gold.
These were my oarlocks, melted down and reformed again. The same and entirely new.
Afterwards Ben took us upstairs to show us the company molds. Row after row and row of shapes carved by man and machine over decades to be filled with molten metal to make a thing that a human would use. Perhaps that use might be longer than a lifetime.
If not, it might end up here again in one form or another.
“How many do you have?” I asked.
Ben shrugged.
“I don’t know–thousands of them?”
