Kirkpatrick Black Iron from Hinges & Brackets
Hinges and Brackets, stockists of Kirkpatrick British made Black malleable Iron fittings. To order you can either phone us on 01233 645249 or access our website at www.anyoldiron.co.uk where you can buy online a range of stocked items for prompt delivery, or order Kirkpatrick items to be specially made for you.
Kirkpatrick
We stock Kirkpatrick black iron at Hinges and Brackets because we trust their quality. We only stock proper genuine Kirkpatrick Black Iron architectural hardware door and window fittings, such as thumblatches, window catches, window stays, cabin hooks, hinges, knobs, knockers, handles, letterboxes, often made to traditional vernacular designs dating back to before the industrial revolution.
Still made in Walsall, West Midlands in England, Kirkpatrick make black iron hardware in their traditional labour intensive way which they have been doing since early Victorian times. This involves first making a sand mould in their dedicated old foundry around a pattern of the shape to be cast in iron. Pig iron and scrap steel meanwhile is smelted in their furnace, and once molten is poured by hand in individual ladles into all the sand moulds and the iron left to cool and solidify.
Once cooled the iron castings are sent to the ovens for the important part of the Kirkpatrick process, where the iron is made malleable. This process makes the product flexible, by removing the brittleness of cast iron, ensuring all Kirkpatrick hardware is durable and built to last. The oven annealing takes many days to achieve a good thermal soak of the iron, with the cast iron shapes being put into steel barrels and covered in a special haematite ore. The cave like ovens are heated up slowly over the course of several days to the required temperature and then held at that temperature for a day before being ‘heated down’ so that the iron cools slowly. Once the burners are switched off it still may be a couple of days before the cave like ovens have cooled enough for them to be unloaded.
Now with the malleable iron components out of the ovens, the process of making useful hardware commences. First the malleable iron components are cleaned up by rolling in a barrel of shot, and sometimes fettled to remove casting snags, and then sent to the machine shop. In the machine shop an army of workers beavers away, hammering, drilling and bending bare iron components together into knobs, handles, hinges, catches, latches and all manner of architectural hardware.
Once assembled the goods are taken to the blacking plant where they are first immersed in a black paint which is then cured and next sprayed in a special black powder coating, which is then baked on to ensure a durable finish that is suitable for external and internal use.
To get your hands on genuine Kirkpatrick hardware through Hinges & Brackets, you can either phone us on 01233 645249 or access our website at www.anyoldiron.co.uk where you can buy online a range of stocked items for prompt delivery.
To see Kirkpatricks own website visit www.kirkpatrick.co.uk
