Garden Forks English Toffee Paint Chip Cards Bundt Pans
The garden fork was once a very prized possession-- so coveted, it was often the object of theft. That was centuries ago, when a family's very survival depended on the crops they grew. Today, of course, food is mass produced and sold in supermarkets. But the garden fork still rules in the backyard garden. There are many versions of the trusty garden fork. Use one to work the garden, and you'll reap the benefits. At this factory, they've been forging garden forks from a solid-steel slab for over two centuries. Using a 660-ton punch press, they cut two basic fork shapes from this hot and malleable slab. The tines or prongs for this particular kind of fork are shorter than most because these are border forks used for turning soil rather than digging deep. With the basic shape now established, it's back into the furnace to re-soften the stem. A worker repeatedly feeds it to rollers to thin and widen it substantially. He strikes the stem with another punch press. This one hit trims it while cutting holes for attaching the wood shaft. The trimmings will be remelted and recycled into new forks. The next press slams the steel stem into a cylindrical die to force it into the basic shape of a socket. He slides the socket onto a coned form and strikes it repeatedly to refine the socket shape. This sizes it for a wooden shaft. They take an entirely different approach when making digging forks because of their longer curved tines. After forging a kind of spider shape, a worker bends a prong around a post to orient it for shaping. This two-person team works in tandem. One fires the spider and bends the prongs. The other worker inserts the prong in the grooves of two revolving dies. This rolls the tine within the confines of the grooves to stretch it long and thin. With two tines now shaped, his partner bends them out of the way so he can work on the third tine. Rolling takes 18 months of training to perfect. If the tine isn't precisely aligned with the grooves, the equipment could seize and throw the worker backwards. Not only could he be injured, but the fork and the dies would most certainly be wrecked. With a fourth tine now stretched long and thin like the rest, the other member of the team twists all four tines around the post again, this time to bend them all in the same general direction. After about 10 minutes of work, they have the rough shape of a digging fork. They then form the socket and crop the tines. Fired to a supple state again, a worker drives tooling between the tines to straighten them and even the gaps between them. He rests the fork socket against a steel slope and lowers a ram. It slams into the tines to push the socket against the slope and bend it upward-- a more effective angle for digging. He inserts the tines in a press one at a time. The press closes around each tine to taper the corners. A ram now pounds the base of the tines against a swooped anvil to give it a gentle curve. He plunges the hot fork into cool water, and the shock hardens the steel. The next worker grinds off any rough bits from the sides and sharpens the edges. He narrows the tips to a point, and this will enable the fork to pierce solid earth. A worker repairs any irregularities with his hammer. Here you can see the difference this makes. The prongs on the left are out of alignment. The ones on the right have been fixed. They apply an electrostatic charge onto the forks to attract a green powder spray. Once cured, it forms a colorful skin that resists corrosion. Now out of the curing oven, a worker clamps the ends to lock the fork in place while he inserts the ash wood shaft into the socket. He secures it with rivets. Using a belt sander, he blends the wood to the metal in a process known as linishing. He also sands the rivets to make them flush to the surface of the metal. The bottom fork is the one that has been linished. He dips the wood shaft and handle in varnish, giving it a glossy stain that enhances the grain. This garden fork is now done. It won't look shiny and new for long, because things are sure to get dirty very soon. Toffee is a type of candy traditionally made of caramelized sugar or molasses and butter. There are many different varieties-- soft and chewy or hard and brittle. English toffee, which is actually an american style of toffee, is very buttery and typically has a topping of chopped nuts. This english toffee is completely free of dairy ingredients and is kosher certified, making it ideal for toffee lovers with certain dietary restrictions. The workers at this small american confectioner make this special recipe entirely by hand one small batch at a time. They start by combining water and sugar. They heat the mixture until the sugar dissolves. Then they add a formula so top-secret they won't let us see it. All they'll reveal is that it contains a combination of vegetable oils and shortening which are non-dairy substitutes for butter and beta carotene to give the toffee that familiar golden color. They add an emulsifier called lecithin to stabilize all these ingredients. As soon as the mixture reaches the boiling point, they add salt. This enhances the flavor and helps produce a rapid boil that continues for several hours until the mixture hits a top-secret target temperature. By that point, most of the water has evaporated, producing sweet, thick, liquid toffee. Now they open a hot-water valve that heats up a table, then carefully pour the toffee onto the surface. The heat keeps the toffee pliable while they spread it out. They spread it wider and wider until the toffee sheet is evenly thick. They don't actually measure. They just eyeball it, so the thickness varies somewhat. But that lack of uniformity is part of the charm of handmade sweets. They take a tool with multiple cutting wheels spaced about two inches apart. They run it over the toffee sheet in one direction, then in the other. Then they shut off the hot-water valve and open the cold-water one to cool the table surface and harden what are now toffee squares. Within minutes, the squares are hard enough to be broken apart. Next, the first of two ingredients that will turn this into english toffee-- molten semi-sweet chocolate. Once this tempering machine heats it to the right consistency, a pump feeds it to the enrobing machine that coats the toffee squares in two stages, starting on the bottom. The underside now coated, the squares move on to a refrigerated belt. The cold quickly hardens the chocolate. Then they move into the next station which covers the top with chocolate. As the now fully-coated squares exit the enrobing machine, the belt vibrates, shaking off the excess chocolate. The squares move on to another refrigerated belt and a worker manually sprinkles them with the second ingredient that makes this english toffee-- chopped pecans. The squares travel through a cooling tunnel for several minutes to set. As they reach the end of the line, excess nuts drop off and collect in a pan below, ready for sprinkling onto new squares. Some english toffee recipes call for almonds rather than pecans. Whichever variety of nut, every recipe follows the same structure. Layering sweet and crunchy toffee, smooth and creamy chocolate, and coarsely chopped nuts-- three different textures, tastes, and sensations brought together in a single confection. And just like other decadently delicious desserts, english toffee is heaven to anyone with a serious sweet tooth. Trying to decide on a paint color? Each card is a small sample of related shades, allowing you to view the actual hues without prying off the lids of paint cans. With thousands of shades to choose from, how do they get it all down on paper? Whether you're looking for a brilliant blue or a marvelous mauve, careful scrutiny of paint chip cards can help you get it right before the paint hits the wall. Highly concentrated colorants stored in tanks will be used to reproduce paint colors in lacquer similar to the kind used in nail polish. Lacquer produces better results on paper than actual paint. They pipe the colorants to a dispenser. At the same time, a bucket containing lacquer heads toward it. The dispenser has many tentacles with nozzles at the end of each one and each tentacle is connected to one of the colorant tanks. A computerized mechanism grabs the nozzles to dispense different colorants following a specific paint-color formula. The bucket sits on a scale and the weight is constantly monitored by the computer to confirm that exact amounts are being added. A blender mixes the colorants in the lacquer. The mixing speed and time have been preset to avoid over or under mixing. And now for the color test. A technician pulls a bit of the lacquer-based paint on a sheet of paper just under a steel bar. Using that bar, he spreads the color evenly across the paper. Then it's into a kind of moving convection oven to dry the color. The technician compares the color and gloss to that of the standard. He also does a computer analysis and sends the formula back for tweaking when necessary. Once they perfect the hue and gloss, production is ready to roll. A worker pours the approved lacquer-based paints into cylindrical tanks above the coating machine. There are over two dozen of these tanks because they'll be putting that many colors on paper in one production run. He connects plastic tubing to the tanks to narrow the flow and aim it at the die block below. He activates the machine and adjusts the tension of the paper as it moves forward. Lacquer flows into a die, coating the paper with an endless rainbow of color. A bar overhead spreads the lacquer evenly without actually touching the paper. The striped paper then travels through an oven. The solvents evaporate, leaving a dried lacquer skin on the paper. If regular paint had been used, the paper would have absorbed it and ended up wavy. But with the lacquer paint, it remains flat. Rotary blades cut the coated paper into sheets sized to fit printing machinery down the line. They land in a neat stack. Using a transparent template, the next worker measures the width of each stripe. He then confirms that the colors are in the correct order by checking each stripe against the approved proofs. He checks the gloss with a glossmeter. It aims light on an angle and registers the reflection to confirm that the gloss is consistent. With the okay from the tester, the entire production run receives the go-ahead. The press operator stacks them facedown for loading into the printer. A feeder serves up the striped sheets to the printing line one at a time. It's a 4-station printing press. Each cylinder is equipped with an ink of a different color to stand out against the various paint-card stripes. They print the paint color names and numbers on both sides. They also apply varnish to the back of the sheets so the paint chip cards won't stick to one another when stacked. Named and numbered, the color stripes are now identifiable. The sheets go under a guillotine blade which slices them into paint chip cards. Powered by hydraulics and super sharp, the blade cuts through hundreds of paper sheets like butter. They produce 3 1/2 million paint chip cards a day at this factory. With so many options, the cards are stacked against a quick decision. A bundt pan is for baking a dense, ring-shaped cake called a bundt. It typically has a fluted or a swirl design. It originated in europe hundreds of years ago and quite possibly gets its name from the german bundkuchen-- "kuchen" meaning "cake" and "bund" meaning "a gathering of people". Bundt pans were originally ceramic, which is fragile, or cast iron, which is heavy. Today's version is typically made of cast aluminum-- unbreakable and infinitely lighter. It also has a nonstick coating. At the factory, they begin the production process by melting ingots of recycled aluminum. The furnace heats the ingots to 1,300-degrees fahrenheit, at which point, they liquify in about a minute. From the melting furnace, workers transfer the molten aluminum to a holding furnace which keeps it in a liquid state until casting. The casting process is entirely automated. A ladle descends into the holding furnace and scoops up just over two pounds of aluminum, enough to make one bundt pan. The ladle then pours the molten metal into a sleeve which a high-speed ram immediately pushes into a steel bundt-pan mold. The pressure and speed combined shoot the molten aluminum into every nook and cranny of the mold cavity. As the hot aluminum hits the cooler mold, it solidifies in about 10 seconds, then the two halves of the mold automatically separate and a robotic arm extracts the cast pan. Between castings, a robot cleans the mold with a blast of air, water, and lubricant. This removes any aluminum residue, leaving the mold surface pristine. This is critical, because even a tiny speck of dust left behind would mar the next casting. As each pan comes off the machine, workers inspect it for any casting flaws. When it comes time to produce a different style bundt pan, like this one with six mini-cake forms, they simply mount the corresponding mold onto the casting machine. As the machine fills the mold under pressure, some aluminum oozes out between the two halves of the mold. Now a worker cuts off that excess with a single strike of a trim press. The scrap pieces go back into the furnace to be remelted. Next, a computer-guided router working two pans at a time, smoothes the rough edges. Then it refines the handle slots, finalizing the shape. The aluminum surface must be pristine for the nonstick coating to adhere properly, so the pans now go through an industrial washing machine-- one wash and three rinse cycles, and then, before exiting, a drying cycle. Workers put the pans upside down on fixtures which travel down the exterior coasting line. As the pan spins by, spray guns apply a silicone-based decorative coating to the outside surface. The pans then travel through an oven for 15 minutes to cure the coating. Then the workers flip the pans right-side up and place them on fixtures, which spin them through another spray line. This time, to coat the inside. The interior coating is a food-safe silicone-polyester material designed to release the cake easily from the pan. It's similar to a nonstick coating on a fry pan, the difference being that the chemical composition is designed to prevent sugar, rather than protein, from sticking. Again, the pans go through an oven for 15 minutes to cure the coating. Once the finished pans exit the oven, workers inspect them thoroughly, checking for any flaws in the coatings. From a practical perspective, a bundt pan's ringed shape has definite advantages over an ordinary baking pan. The tube in the middle funnels heat to the center of the cake batter, helping it bake quicker and more thoroughly. From a decorative perspective, when you compare an ordinary pan to an elegant bundt, the latter certainly takes the cake.