Some time ago when I was living in the States, I helped a friend restore a Friendship Sloop. She was built in 1907 originally for cod fishing on the Grand Banks, but had long since seen better days and was due for a Viking funeral before Tom saved her and undertook a major restoration project. Good progress had been made with the hull rebuild when we got round to thinking about ballast.

The Friendships originally used rocks for internal ballast and if they had a big catch of fish, it was easy to trim the boat by chucking some overboard. As fishing was not in the plan, we looked at the options: (1) pig iron was hard to come by and required maintenance to stop the bilges filling with rust; (2) boulders were easy to find, but being irregular in shape took up a lot of space, so (3) lead, because of its mass, became the ballast of choice. Then the bad news. If any of you have bought lead recently, you will have discovered that is not cheap, which is what we found going round the scrap yards of New Hampshire... and we wanted a ton of it! However Tom, being a good 'contacts' man, sourced two 45 gallon oil drums filled with old lead wheel weights, in a local garage. To our surprise, the garage was happy not only to give them to us free of charge but even deliver them to the rebuild site. We did not think much about it at the time, thinking that they had taken pity on us, though it was odd in a State that puts a price on everything. More about that later!

We now had the raw material and all that we had to do was melt it down and cast it into ingots. The plan was simple. Melt it down in a suitable crucible, clear the junk out of it and pour it into a mould and hey-presto, clean lead ballast. Well, that was the idea and we did a trial run using an old iron bucket as the melting pot sitting over a large gas heating ring, with some teflon lined bread-making tins which looked about the right size, sneaked out of our kitchen, for moulds. The trial took place in Tom's yard, which fortunately was some distance from any other houses, because, as soon as the first load of wheel weights started to heat up, the whole area was filled with evil-smelling smoke. This continued until all the rubbish had been skimmed off the molten lead with another now-deceased kitchen utensil. The first pour yielded two bread tins of lead which rapidly cooled and when turned over, out dropped our first ballast. Flushed with success, we reloaded the bucket and repeated the procedure, that is until it came to getting the lead out of the mould .... which it didn't. Tapping with a hammer and prizing with a screwdriver were of no avail, so the trial came to an abrupt end, however, we knew we were on the right track and made the instant decision to scale up the production.

By the following weekend we had got an old iron bath, some bits of iron pipe and the most important part, some sand to use for making the moulds in. This came from a neighbour who was about to empty his children's sand pit as the local feline population had taken it over as an outdoor litter box. Armed with a rake to remove the lumps and some sacks to hold the sand, we soon had transported it back to the foundry area. The bath was mounted on some bricks, the pipe fitted to the plug hole and led to the adjacent casting area, where the sand had been compacted and moulds pressed into it using one of the solid tins as a pattern. With a second burner under the bath we were ready to go.

Luck was on our side and the first melt was under way, wheel weights were shoveled into the bath and before long, after spooning off the dross, we had clean molten lead. The plug was removed and a river of lead ran into the moulds. All that was necessary was to wait until the lead had set, and then ladle in some extra to fill in the contraction depression and bingo, the first production ballast had been produced. The only downside had been the evil-smelling smoke from the bath, together with the tomcat aroma from the hot sand. However, it was considered a fair price to pay for free lead. As we congratulated ourselves on the achievement, the penny dropped as to why the garage was only too glad to off-load the drums of weights. The contamination on them was a mixture of asbestos from brake pads, oil and grease from leaky bearings plus tyre dust, which, together with the lead, made what is commonly called 'toxic waste'! We had unwittingly saved them a high disposal cost. The good news was that the ballast was just the job and the environmental agency never found out, though we made a point of always keeping up-wind during subsequent melts!