We have some old hand forged nails. The nails were made by a blacksmith.

We polished them with a Dremel tool using a wire brush.  Did you know that a Dremel tool can spin 500 times per second?  Wow.  We wore safety glasses to protect our eyes.

Here is a polished nail.

Here are some facts on old nails.

• Old nails were once so valuable that when a building burnt or fell down people went through with magnets to find the nails and save them.
• Nails provide one of the best clues to help determine the age of historic buildings, especially those constructed during the nineteenth century.
• Between the 1790s and the early 1800s, various machines were invented in the United States for making nails from bars of iron.

Here is the a chart for nails. (Copyright Thomas Visser)

You can read more about it here: http://www.uvm.edu/histpres/203/nails.html

That is all for now!

References:

• Thomas D. Visser, “Nails: Clues to a Building’s History”, University of Vermont Historic Preservation Research (11/4/2014), http://www.uvm.edu/histpres/203/nails.html