I suspect a significant number of badges were hand voided especially in the early days and as piercing dies broke the rest of a batch may well have been hand worked if the cost of a new die was more than the labour incurred.
A skilled worker could probably complete a glengary type in about 5-10 minutes, so a group of 10 women could easily turn out around 1,000 badges a day.
I'd suspect there were a couple of separate dies doing different areas on that badge, fitting lots of small areas together in one would make it liable to be weak.
There might have been some economy measure too on a later order or even a die gets lost, which isn't that uncommon either.
Braizing (hard soldering) hasn't really changed much in the last 200 years, and only the tools have altered to make it easier. The 1920 or 30's saw more of a switch to silver solder from brass as it became cheaper, and the 1860/70 saw gas torches become more common (coal gas and rubber pipes/bellows), but you'd be amazed at what you can do with a charcoal burner and a mouth blow pipe.
A lot of old school jewelers, even up to today, can still use a bunsen type burner or domestic gas and mouth pipe.
One of the main reasons for brass/bronze braizing was your factory produced it for free as scrap, either trimmings, filing or sawing dust etc. And you didn't have to worry so much about H&S rules about how much lead, zinc or antimony/arsenic etc you mix in with it.
Resistance (electrical) and now laser welding are more common than oxy-accetylene as it's far less explosive and cheaper in factories, which is more reserved for steel and other high temp metals.
Most glass enamelling on badges is done with an open torch rather than a kiln even today.
The big difference from today is the idea of making your own braize or solder from scratch wasn't alien. A book like Henley's Formulas from 1903 devotes about 10 pages to different compositions
|