I like complex, interesting, and historically important food. You might call me a foodie. You might also be wondering what that has to do with metalworking. Well, recently we’ve had a customer bring in a couple of pieces of very specialized cooking equipment, and there is possibly nothing in the world I like more than very specialized cooking equipment. This is a duck press: The duck press before refinishing. A duck press is used to create a dish called, interestingly enough,

I know what you’re thinking. A holiday post? In retort, I will say that December is a bad time to start thinking about having your menorah polished. We’ve had a couple folks recently who wanted to be absolutely sure they were ready and brought in their menorahs for polishing. The first menorah is a small brass piece with the shamash (the ninth light) on an arm with a Star of David. It came in a bit tarnished and bent, with the Star of David turned to the side. So we did what

Sometimes… or actually quite often, I find cool/fun/hilarious things on the internet. Only vary rarely, however, do they have anything to do with brass and bronze. Today was one of those rare occasions. Back in 1992, the Australian government officially took their one and two-cent coins out of circulation. Those coins, much like American pennies, were largely made of copper. So now Australia has a huge pile of copper. What to do with it? Well, if you remember the year 2000 (a

At Progressive Bronze, we have a lot of capabilities, and a lot of experience dealing with unique jobs. That is why we don’t like to say no to jobs, even though some can be toughies. A customer recently brought in one of those toughies – a statue of a chariot in pieces. Talk about your busted rides…. The horse team had become detached from the chariot, one of the horse’s legs was broken, the rider had come off the chariot, and her arm was off as well. So put it all back toget

Happy almost Thanksgiving, everyone! In this post, I’d like to highlight some of Progressive Bronze’s custom manufacturing projects and capabilities. We’ve already covered some custom manufacturing projects like these curtain rods, and now we’d like to cover some of the other projects we’ve taken on. Here at Progressive Bronze we have a fully equipped shop, able to machine, spin, or cast parts. The parts are then finished to your specification, be it raw, polished, or plated

I think it’s safe to say that I love old lamps. And the lamp a customer recently brought in is a doozy. This lamp is old. We’re not entirely sure how old, but we think it was converted from oil to electricity sometime early last century. It’s got a lovely painted ceramic vase and brass hardware. Unfortunately it was knocked over (or fortunately for me, since I wouldn’t be writing this if it hadn’t happened) and the base was bent. Most importantly we had to get this fixed. We

Welcome back! Today we present our third and final primer on our most-used metals. We close out the series with aluminum. That’s al-YOU-min-ium for our British readers. Unlike bronze or brass, aluminum is an honest-to-goodness element, atomic number 13, in the boron group. There it is. It is the third most abundant element in the earth’s crust after oxygen and silicon, but is so reactive that finding it naturally occurring in its elemental state is exceedingly rare. Instead,

Recently, Ursula from The Drapery House in Park Ridge, IL approached us to custom manufacture curtain rods for a client of hers. She had a design in mind for the entire set, from brackets to rods to rings, so all she needed was someone to turn her ideas in to reality. Enter Progressive Bronze! The design is very clean, with straight lines and not much embellishment. For the rods themselves we used hollow brass tube, but we also needed brackets to hold them. Ursula gave us the

A couple of weeks ago, a gentleman walked in to our shop with this antique lamp: Apparently it’s an old-style dentist’s lamp, and has been in his family for quite some time. There are all sorts of articulations on it that allow tooth illumination from several angles. It swivels and tilts in its wall bracket, as you can see below, as well as has a telescoping pole. After the telescoping pole, the four-lamp head hangs down to give you plenty of light while you polish. Over the

Brass Hello readers, it’s time for metallurgy class again, this time focusing on brass. Brass is the second most common metal we handle at Progressive Bronze, and it’s offered as an alternative to bronze for nearly everything we make. Where as bronze is an alloy of copper and most often tin, brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. It popped up some time after bronze, in the first millennium BC. Its composition was not well understood for more than 2000 years, as zinc in metalli