This week, I have been helping Michael Zappert clear a stained glass studio in Aboyne. The studio belonged to Martin Farrelly, wonderful craftsman and stained glass artist who worked at, amongst other studios, Whitefriars, Goddard & Gibbs and Pluscarden Abbey. There are many, many stories to be told about Martin & his work, but I know Mike plans to write a piece at some stage so I'll not dwell on the clearance. I will say, however, that it was a privilege to meet the Martin & Val, and to benefit from their tremendous generosity.

Part of the reason I became involved with the clearance is that I had expressed an interest in milling lead calms by hand. Hand-milling lead used to be a common activity in stained glass studios, and I'd been musing that I'd like to try to revive the process. According to several writers, hand-milled lead is beautiful to work with - anyone who has worked with lead from Heaps and Stillemans knows that not all lead is created equal - and has a unique look very different to that of machine-milled lead. Another factor was that, like most studios, I have boxes of scrap lead and I liked idea of turning them into shiny, lead calm. Especially with lead prices as they are...

The remains of a lead mill had been sitting in a wooden box in the studio, unused, and Mike arranged that I could have the box and contents in order to attempt to "reverse engineer" a working lead mill. So I am now the proud custodian of a box of spindles, sprockets and "cheeks" (pictured above), manufactured (probably before 1939) by Crawford & Co., Tottenham, London.

The bulk of project will involve the recreation of the body of the mill itself, as that is completely missing, as well as the moulds for casting the blank cames (or calms). However, those tasks will probably be a lot easier than recreating the cheeks and spindles used to actually shape the lead. When I say easy, bear in mind that I have never seen one one of these mills in action, and my research so far has unearthed only some drawings of mills and the disassembled components...