Mastermind (profession)
Wire pullers make wires and cables from metals such as iron and copper . They prepare the starting material (metal rods and other rolled products ), adjust the drawing machines, draw wires, weld and refine them and control the manufacturing quality. As a training occupation, it has been replaced in Germany by the metal technology specialist since the 2013 training year .
history
The process of wire production has barely changed over the centuries: bars are pre-forged in a cold way and (today in the form of hot-rolled wire) pulled through a tapered eyelet (the haul ) of a drawing iron. Since it is almost never possible to achieve the desired final size in a single operation, several drawing operations are required in succession.
A special art in wire drawing was to design the drawbar in such a way that there was as little friction as possible, i.e. less effort was required. The hesitants or masterminds in Altena kept this art as a secret that could not be carried on to other places.
The first drawing dies appeared in the first century AD. In his history of the iron wire industry, OH Döhner said in 1925 that wire was initially used for the ring armor , which the Romans (according to M. Terentius Varro † 26 BC) had seen among the Gauls. In France, drawing irons have been found that are believed to date from the Gallic-Roman period.
To make the armor, you needed a huge number of iron rings that were as uniform as possible - wire that could easily be worked into armor mesh by bending, flattening and riveting holes. The many wars between Franconia and Saxony since the 6th century are likely to have ensured that the art of wire drawing was also practiced in Germany around this time - first in the Nuremberg area , later in Westphalia . The main place for the production of the ring armor was the city of Iserlohn until it disappeared from the military armor . For finer wires, the neighboring Altena will later become the “wire capital of the world”. The trade with the coveted Osemund was protected from Altena Castle .
The numerous small watercourses with their steep gradients could be used to drive the water wheels, and the extensive mountain forests provided enough wood to glow the iron wire during manufacture.
Most of the Altena wire rolls are likely to have been made in the course of the 13th and 14th centuries at the latest, because the register books introduced at the end of the 14th century do not contain any sovereign permits for the use of the watercourses after this time.
In contrast to the water mills for grinding grain, which were known in western Germany since the times of Roman rule, the water drives for wire production were called rollers or wire mills . In the middle of the 18th century there were 66 rolls in Altena.
Two draw benches (“blocks”) were attached to the shaft in each wheel, on each of which two people worked, namely the actual mastermind or hesitant and an assistant. The hardest work, the pulling, was done by the waterwheel, whose powerful turning movement was converted into pressing and pulling movements by a complicated cam and lever mechanism: the pliers closed automatically, grabbed the forged wire and pulled it through the drawing iron, whereupon it was now thinner form was drawn onto a drum. The bank puller worked in jerks , pulling only a few centimeters at a time. The drawn wire was covered all over with pincer bites. They may have looked rather unattractive with the coarser types that were finished on the bench, but disappeared if the wire was later drawn finer on the Winner discs . A device that made the coarse wire thinner was called the Kleinzögerbank . Up until the middle of the 19th century, little technical changes were made to these workbenches.
Due to its uncomplicated handling, the Kleinzögerben , simply called the drawbench , is mainly used today by silver and goldsmiths .
Training and development
On August 1, 2013, the training regulations for the new apprenticeship specialist for metal technology in the field of forming and wire technology came into force, which replaces the wire puller. Because the training regulations for the profession from 1955 were out of date. There was no training regulation with detailed content and modern examination requirements. The Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training therefore examined this and other occupations in 2009 before the Vocational Training Act came into force and came to the conclusion that these apprenticeships could be incorporated into a new apprenticeship with a focus or specialization. The profession could include a broad-based qualification base and differentiate into individual areas in the second year. Within this occupation, the qualifications of a wire goods maker could be bundled together with those of a spring maker and wire goods maker in a focus on "wire and spring technology".
See also
literature
- Marina Düttmann (Ed.): Wire: from chain mail to superconductor . Mönnig, Iserlohn 2001, ISBN 3-933519-15-2 .
- Hanno Trurnit: The masterminds: a family story from the southern region . Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt 2001 (Distribution: Verlag Meisenbach GmbH, Postfach 2069, 96011 Bamberg).
Web links
- Mastermind in the appointment of the Federal Employment Agency
- Federal association of ropers and net makers
Individual evidence
- ↑ Training regulations for specialists in metal technology , website of the BiBB, (PDF; 111 kB), accessed on August 1, 2013.
- ↑ Review of training needs in the metal sector ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the BiBB website . Retrieved October 25, 2010.
