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Яџѕѕіаиѕ. Yes, I know that spells Ytdzdziais, don't bother me with details. If Тетяіѕ can do it, I can too.

The factory where the Iridium was melted is located in Franklin, New Jersey. Franklin is one of those increasingly rare towns in the Garden State whose Arcadian beauty is highly susceptible to contracting stripmalls and Walmarts. After infection takes place, the stripmalls metastasize and spread down the main drag; and from the aesthetic perspective, you might as well dust off and nuke the site from orbit.

But Franklin seems to be stuck in an enclave, in a beautiful finger, jabbing down from upstate New York, pointing to the heart of New Jersey, saying "Don't fuck this up". The land itself is truly beautiful in the way only American land left the hell alone can be.

Along the road leading out of the center of Franklin lie such points of interest as Mine Lake, Mine Park and the world-famous Franklin Fluorescent Mineral-Mine Museum. Yes, Franklin was once home to a mine. A mine which produced fluorescent minerals. Don't bother with any of these; the museum is a gyp and the tour guide has hair growing on his nose.

But enough stalling, on to the Rahssians. As to the Russians, there were four of them:

Trofim Pachinko	Father─┐
Anton Pachinko	Son── Family
Svetlana Pachinko	Daughter┘
Yegvenii Arkedeivitch	Employee/possibly former family serf

</table>


As one approached the tan industrial building in its idyllic quarters,



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one drove up a short gravel drive to a small parking lot whose only notable feature was a largish mailbox with three separate company names sharing it. After we got out of the car, New Jersey smelled fresh, not only in comparison to the vague urine-asphalt odor of New York City, but as an absolute. Not for the last time, I was really struck by how goddamn beautiful this place was.

We went up a short incline. This brought us to an ordinary glass door. We knocked. We waited. We waited. We noticed the doorbell. We rang. We waited. Eventually we grew bold and entered. This brought us into a narrow hallway that had all the indications of being nothing more than drywall, veneer and ceiling tile. We said "Hello....?" No one answered our question. We proceeded down the hallway flanked by doors, unsure as to whether the desire not to surprise someone for the sake of politeness overrode the rudeness of opening a closed door. At an impasse, we kept walking down the hallway, not opening any doors. But, we rapidly became trapped, when we realized that the only way out of this hallway was to open a door. Because it seemed the least likely to be the entrance to an office, bathroom or weird eastern European slave dungeon, we chose the last door the hallway had to offer. I turned the knob as if it had been made by Faberge, and swung the cheap door open to reveal three batshit insane Russians, one quiet Russian and 27,500 ft² of factory floor.

"Hellough!" said Anton Pachinko, leaping down the steep stairs of the electron beam furnace. "Hellough." said Svetlana Pachinko, as she teetered over to us on high heeled sandals. "Hellough." said Trofim Pachinko as he strode over from standing next to Yegvenii Arkedeivitch. Yegvenii neither moved nor spoke.

And so we were introduced to Rusomaniacal batshittery.

After the pleasantries were brought out and marched around, the business cards exchanged and the subtle warnings about revealing technical secrets impressed upon us, the Iridium was produced. Everybody hefted the currant jam jar, and agreed that it was a very dense currant jam jar.Antonopened the jar with calculated indifference, and poured the Iridium out onto a steel worktable. The beauty of those silver drops falling through the air was quickly dashed by the deafening noise they made as they struck the tabletop. Each button bounced to an unnatural height, both surfaces having near perfect inelasticity. The buttons were put on a scale, which read out, oddly, in pounds. 1.82 lbs; we were to expect anywhere from 2 to 10% evaporation during the melting. Antonscooped up the Iridium and clambered up the steep furnace platform stairs. He tossed the buttons into one of the moulds in the black copper crucible. He did it with inattention to the Iridium's value that was so obvious that I suspected it was intentional.

"Now ees pomp-down; twenty meenutes." Antonsaid, and as if on que, Yegvenii pressed two buttons, the smaller of the two vacuum pumps started futtering.

As we waited, I began to realize that the actuality of melting 1.715 pounds of Iridium was not quite the exhilarating experience I had led myself to believe it would be. The furnace went 'BRWANNNNNNNAH', the platform vibrated, Theo and the Popular Science photographer fussed over their cameras, Oliver took a walk. The furnace continued to go 'BRWANNNNNNNNAH', and I soon realized that the only thing which was actually happening was that I was getting bored.

So I decided to take notes on these mad Russians as a way of not being lulled to sleep by the surprisingly soothing 'BRWANNNNNNNAH' of the furnace. This is what I've reconstructed from the vibration-crazed writing in my notebook.


Аитои Раcніиқо

Anton Pachinko, or 'Anto' as he revealingly likes to shorten his name, is about six foot eight inches tall and not an ounce more then 160 pounds.  This lithe near-manorexia, as you might expect, shows. He looks something like a younger version of Lurch from the Addam's Family movies. His accent is mid-range and not very thick. When he says 'Iron' he says " EYE-hrenn" and when he says 'Niobium' he says "NHEEYO-byum". He relates to the machinery he operates in exactly the same way Peter Stormare does to Mir in "Armageddon" (a parallel Anto freely admits).



As I watched him operate the electron beam furnace, I became struck by the little details that are supposed to make good writing good. The way his forearms, studded with a net of superficial veins, found a lifting bracket on the vacuum chamber to rest upon, as his hands made adjustments too small to see on the beam control panel. Every once in a while, without taking his eyes from the viewing port in front of him, the right arm would snake its way behind him to find a particular knob on one of the voltage control boxes. I had the feeling of watching a race car driver shifting gears, not needing to look, or even think, about what RPM he was at and what RPM he wanted; there was no decision or deliberation in either movement, the eyes saw something deficient and the hands corrected it.

But this professionalism vanished as soon as the machine ceased to require his attention. Then he was less focused race-car driver and more coked-up six year old. I don't mean that completely derogatorily, either; we are never quite that same mixture of curiosity about the world around us and confidence in ourselves than when we're about six years old. I suspect being an immigrant’s son, and having no contact with jaded American's his age has prolonged this stage. This is what I actually wrote in my notebook

Either Antoninhabits the blissful existence of children in which all the world awaits them as an unopened chest waits in an attic for explorers brave enough to seek it; or his self-confidence was the result of an acute and dangerous sociopathy made all the more real by the four machetes, lying in a row, on the floor of his bedroom

How did I see Antoip's bedroom, you ask? He showed me. This was easy because he lives twenty feet from the furnace, in a 12 x 15 foot room.

In the brief glance I got of it, a few features struck me as important enough to remember. First, the aforementioned machetes, lying one next to the other, shiney with polishing. I imagined Anto leaning over these knives in a nightly ritual of obsessively rubbing. I banished the thought as being revealingly Freudian. No, I said to myself, he's just a man who likes to shine his knives, and then display them for inspection. Perhaps he likes to go for walks in the woods, roughly hacking his way through the supple verdant virgin fore.... nevermind.

Second, the bare mattress propped vertically against one wall; there, I imagine, because it was about half the room's square footage. Third, the beigetastic homemade computer running Linux, set into what was, in all likelihood, the single ugliest particle board-cored, veneer clad computer desk-shelfette ever cursed into mass production.

The general feel of the room was that of someone who was, again, either living in the blissful world of children or a dangerous sociopath.

But back to the factory. I should probably give it a once over. You've already seen the furnace, in the last post, but there were a few, peculiarly Russians, features that deserve mention. First, what the hell is it.

It is a vacuum electron beam furnace designed to melt high purity metals and make alloys of very precise component ratio. All this means is that a beam of electron is shot through a piece of metal until it gets so hot that it melts. Because there are no gasses or fuels involved, electron beam furnaces are extremely clean. It was also made in Central Europe, which means that it is neither of the most reliable design nor the most sophisticated manufacture. I'll give you an example.




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You see that maroon office chair? Directly beneath it is a rectangular green metal box with what look like a bunch of clear hoses coming out the top. That is the thermometer. The coolant (water) which circulates from the tank (1) through the cathode head (which must be hit periodically with a rubber hammer to break up the carbonization that forms on the contacts) (8) and the vacuum chamber (7) has a stage where it is squirted out those hoses into that open metal box. To determine how hot the machine is, the operator sticks his hand in the stream of water. If the coolant starts to scald his hand, the machine is too hot to open. If it's like bathwater, wait ten minutes. Room temperature, the furnace is at about 150 °F and can be opened safely. The box of water was also where Anto unceremoniously tossed the Iridium billet after the last melt causing an alarming cloud of steam and momentary terror at the possibility of contraction fracture. Fortunately, the Iridium was close enough to monocrystaline that the whole thing shrank evenly. When I asked Anto if this method of cooling was really a good idea, he said we could throw the billet across the factory to see.

I declined.


The furnace is generally used to make rectangular billets larger than the one Oliver had done, about quarto size (12 x 6 inches). These are pretty much useless by themselves, they're rough and pitted, a lot like the billet you see in the QTVR. To sell them, they have to be made into plates, sheets and so forth. This is done on a rolling mill:



This particular one is English, and forty years old. It is by a very large margin the best piece of equipment in that factory. In the 1960's, England was really at the forefront of heavy industry. Other countries could do it cheaper (Japan) other countries could do it faster (Germany) but no one could do it more precisely and with such fanatical attention to quality as the English. This thing is literally the Rolls-Royce of rolling mills. It used essentially the same construction model as the car company: test everything to destruction. This means that every single component was used in its intended capacity until it broke. When it broke, an engineer would look to see how and why it broke, and then improve it. This process went on until the company was satisfied that the only reason anything on these machines would ever fail is that they were being used to perform intensely stressful mechanical actions. That's why this thing still works, and works, I might add, as well as the day it was first turned on.

Anyway, you just feed a rough billet, hot or cold, into one end of the mill, and it comes out slightly thinner, slightly longer, slightly wider and much smoother from the other side. Repeat until desired thickness is reached. Though the Russians weren't using this mill on the day we were there, I have seen similar ones at work, and it’s something you can watch over and over again. Thick ugly thing goes in, thin pretty thing comes out. Magic. It's the goal of anorexia applied to material science. And it looks indescribably cool to see a red hot billet of metal get sucked in between two cylinders the size of 55 gallon drums, spitting sparks as its crystal structure give way with a shriek that sounds disconcertingly animalistic. Anto described it far better than I; "Eetz like pooting poopidog in."

That little conversation didn't do much to tip the man child - sociopath scales in favor of the innocent...

To the right of the rolling mill is a mass of wooden crates covered with plastic sheeting. This is the disassembled magnetic levitation furnace. The whole point of this factory is to make a given metal purer. To do that, you must control all stages of the metal's processing very very carefully. In the electron beam furnace, clean as it is, the melt is touching many things; the crucible, the dust in the chamber, the claw hammer you use to  prise it out of the mould, your hands, and so on. Ideally, you would want it to touch none of these things. Hence, some other batshit insane Russians developed, in 1970, the magnetic levitation furnace. The heart of it is really a magnet and a microwave oven; it looks something like this:



The ball is the thing you want to melt, the cage is the thing that generates both the magnetic field to levitate the melt and the antennae which produce the microwaves that actually melt it. This picture isn't precisely what is in the factory furnaces, but it is the same basic idea. The one's I saw probably had a much higher capacity, something like a tennis ball. This photo is from a Spacelab experiment (in this case the gold blob is the size of a shooter marble). One of the more interesting things that happens with magnetic levitation furnaces is supercooling. The field that levitates the melt isn't like a pair of tongs, it's more like a dish. That is, rather than holding the sample rock steady, it it just prevents it from touching the cage (where it would lose heat). The field cross-section is like a well curve, low in the center of the cage, and very high towards the edges. This means that moving the sample in any direction is like rolling it up an increasingly steep hill. Because there are no impurities or surfaces to impinge upon the sample (this is suspended in a vacuum, after all), as it cools it becomes very difficult for crystals to form. The reason being there are no specks of dust or clots of soot for the atoms of the metal to arrange themselves on. So, what you get is a ball of metal which is still liquid, but hundreds of degrees below its freezing point. And this is what happens when something finally triggers mass-crystallization:



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You get a flash of light as essentially all the atoms in the sample leap together to a much lower energy state. It's allegedly quite a thing to see through a view port: a dimly red blob of slowly undulating metal suddenly flashes white, and freezes into a monocrystal. Previously you had to be in space to levitate the sample properly (as the NASA domain of the picture and video indicates), but the Russians figured out how to do it down here.


In front of those crates is arguably one of the coolest things in the factory. It looks exactly like this:



and it will cut metal of any kind up to an inch thick with enough precision to make things like this:



with nothing more than a jet of water.

Think about that. Tap water used to cut metal? Why would anyone think that you could do such a thing; it's absurd. How would you convince people to give you money to pursue something so obviously impossible? I don't know, but someone, somewhere, did just that, and so we have water jet cutters now. The machine itself is probably the thing which most accords to everyone's idea of heavy industry: it's loud, it's dangerous, it makes big clouds of steam and has an alarming safety decal that shows a stylized hand with all the fingers beside it. Separated.

Ok, so it isn't arguable. It is the coolest thing there. Anto made the Popular Science photographer a street number sign from Titanium in about thirty seconds. In heavy industry, when you reach the $100,000 price range it seems you  finally start to get things that are worth it.

Speaking of the photographer, there was an interesting thing that happened while the guy was trying to photograph the Iridium melt. He was using a big Cannon digital camera, the kind they give to news photographers, and was having trouble fitting the lens hood over the viewing port. Anto saw the problem and took off his black t-shirt and gave it to the guy, who, without turning around, said "Thanks", wrapped it around the port and lens hood and continued snapping pictures.

Meanwhile Oliver was sitting in that maroon chair talking to me and said something to Anto about an insect drawing I'd done for him. Anto jerked upright and said "You draw bugz? I foundt bugz een here! Beeg bugz! I show you!", and so he bounded off the furnace platform, shirtless, to his room. When he came out, he was cupping something carefully in his hands. He ran up the stairs to the furnace platform, spoiling whatever shot the photographer was trying to get. He comes up to me, and arranges a dead Luna moth and the largest Jerusalem cricket I have ever seen on his forearm for me to see. Just as I was about to say something, the photographer turned around, probably to ask us not to jiggle the platform, when he saw me leaning over two enormous insects arranged on half-naked Anto's forearm. I looked at the photographer, and he looked at me. I am absolutely certain that he formed a thought to explain this scene but that he quickly discarded it as too perverse and decided to be confused instead. I swear upon the very sanctity of truth that the very next thing the photographer did was look, with a look of aching longingness, at the bottle of vodka that sat on the operator's table.


Уеgvеиіі Аrкеdеіvітcн

This was the quiet Russian who neither moved nor spoke when we first came in. He was not, as far as I could determine, insane. Yegvenii was, judging by the other people in the factory, as near a thing to normal as  any set of Russian parents had ever produced. This is what I wrote down when I was there:

A not quite socialized (let alone de-socialized) peasant, with large, bushy eyebrows, pocked cheeks and sad brown eyes that were occasionally illuminated by a confident professionalism. The jeans, the plaid shirt, the unpretentiously tousled salt-and-pepper hair all united to give the impression of nothing so much as a Russian Gepetto. Thin, nervous of screwing up, yet cautiously confident of his university training. He was a man for whom his education was like an Ikon, treasured, humbling and remote.

He still signs his name the Russian way, family name first: Arkedeivitch Yegvenii.

He was by far, the most likable Russian there. He was also the one to whom I talk ed the least. The fact that he had only a small amount of technical english sort of guaranteed this, but nevertheless. By the time we left the factory after about nine hours there, I found myself with an intense curiousity about Yegvenii. How did he get to the US? Did he work with the Pachinko's in Russia? Was he an inndentured servant? He didn't wear a wedding ring, but he could have easily have taken it off to protect it from the water cutter. It was really kind of amazing: in the nine hours I was there, I never once was able to get close enough to Yegvenii to see if he had a tan line on the left ring finger; and I really tried. He'd have his hands in the jet cutter reservoir, or adjusting the chuck on a lathe, or in big gauntlets, but never in plain sight. This led to the obvious conclusion that the eastern European slave chamber we had not gone into during our exploration of the entrance hallway was where the kindly Yegvenii lived; abused and chained when he wasn't lathing.



Тяоғім Раcніиқо

This is what I wrote down after talking to him:

Short, gray hair, prominent nose, overhanging upper teeth. Confident, Mussolini-like bluster.

He wore the kind of loud shirt that is never complete without a gut to strain its buttons; and on Trofim this shirt lacked nothing. Despite the felicity with which Trofim and his gut had obviously taken to America, there was still the first generation immigrant drive that is innate in everyone who was not born in the United States. The pride he felt at having hacked his way into American (and indeed, international) commerce was even more prominent than the gut this success had created.

I wore a reasonably formal black blazer and nice shoes to this thing, and I imagine, had I been able to see things from his perspective, Trofim might have viewed me as someone wealthier than either Oliver in his t-shirt or Theo in his cargo shorts and Birkenstocks. He could be forgiven for thinking this. However, I, at the time, just thought he was being friendly, what with the giving me tours and the pointing out specs of this thing and that. We got to talking about the furnaces he had, in a casual-like way, and he explained that this was "Torp of the line Rahssian technooluhgey" which you would find nowhere else. "We're the oonly peeple who can make you fife nines neeyobyum for less den your feerst born [untranscribable Russian chuckle]." And on and on. We talked about the virtues of using Iodide titanium over electrolytic titanium (Iodide being the process which leaves 0.05% fewer contaminants in the finished metal). We talked about how Russia's opening up had released a huge amount of new technology which still needed to be refined, but was far superior to the comparable process in the West.

Well, actually, Trofim talked about these things, with me pulling things out of my ass to keep up. So you see, when Theo got that angry email from Trofim wanting to know why he had brought this industrial spy to his factory, I really was quite flattered that Trofim thought I knew anything about high-purity metallurgy.


Svзт׀аиа Раcніиқо

This is what I wrote about Trofim's daughter:

Blonde. There are attractive faces, and there are ugly faces. As The Name of the Rose has shown, ugly faces are not necessarily bad, in fact, they can be quite interesting to look at, even fascinating. Ugly faces can be like ruined landscapes, toxic waste dumps decked out with festive oranges, putrid greens and 'Don't eat me' reds; oil refineries' skeletal scaffolding lit by burn-off towers; open pit mines, great gashes laid open in the earth with its intricate strata exposed , scraped clean of ore. But then there is banal ugliness, a Walmart, a plastic shopping bag, the low quality of billboard printing when you get close to it; things which are hideous precisely because they were designed to be only not displeasing. Such was Svetlana's face.

She was also the most traditionally Russian of the four. She greeted us with a polite curtsey. She ironed Anto's t-shirts. She made us Russian tea and gave us a luncheon of black bread and sausage. Though even this was strange. The tea was strong, the bread was soft and the sausage was spicey. But about twenty minutes into the conversation, I glanced into the kitchen and saw that Svetlana was leaning over the stove where she had boiled the water and toasted the bread. On one of the back burners was a glass plate about twelve inches in diameter. On this glass was a layer of copper plate, maybe an eighth of an inch. On top of that was a coating of lead that Svetlana was melting with the back burner.

I didn't drink any more tea.

As I watched her throughout the day, my first impression began to crack under the weight of further observation. She wore high-heeled sandals and a fashionably light print dress. The only apparent impregnation on the part of her new surroundings was an attempt to pull off casual elegance which succeeded only in showing how much effort it required. The high-heels simply high lit her varicose veins.

Despite her physical appearance, which should have summed to produce a timid woman forced to chomp the domestic bit, her eyes betrayed her. Somebody like Turgenev would have written: "peasants say that eyes like these were only seen in frightened wolves"; I say she was waiting for Trofim's gut to kill him.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, she still gave her business card to me with both hands.




















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