Soap fork

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Soap maker with soap fork ( F )
In front right a Seifner at work, depicted in Agricola (1580)

The soap fork , also Seufengabel is a Mine tool is, for gezähe counted and Seifnern used. It is a multi (seven) pronged, mostly wooden fork and is used as the most important tool in the soap industry, a special kind of mining of ores (removal of soap deposits ). Here, the ore is extracted from the Soap Mountains by washing ("soaping"). The process is suitable, for example, with tin (pewter beads = soap tin) or with gold (gold grains = soap gold), where sand or other easily flushable substances and ore are present.

When soaping pewter, the soap fork made it possible to separate the barley from the dead rock and earth. This often happened in the form that the Zinnseifner built a clarification basin ("Läuterhobel") in a steep stream or artificially created water ditch, into which the tin-containing material was thrown. The mud dissolved in the water, while the heavy rock remained at the bottom of the basin. After draining the water, this was recovered and sieved. The tin-containing ore ("soap tin", "tin barley") could then be brought into the tin melt. The sifting resulted in heaps, called "Raithalden".

Heraldry and place names

The oldest community seal from 1413 of the place Zschorlau shows tough. The miner's tools, wedge pick and soap fork, are shown. In addition to the places that refer to the type of mining with a soap fork in their coat of arms, the mining tradition can also be recognized by many place names: The word stems -seifen, -siefen can be found in Bohemian, Saxon and Silesian place names, such as Braunseifen , Seiffen , Stubenseifen , Ravenseifen , soap mountain , Seiferdau and Seifersbach .

literature

  • Moritz Ferdinand Gätzschmann : Collection of mining expressions. Craz & Gerlach (R. Münnich), Freiberg 1859, p. 69 .
  • Alexander Buttmann : The German place names with special consideration of the originally Wendish in the Mittelmark and Niederlausitz. F. Dümmler, Berlin 1856, ( digitized version ).
  • Heinrich Veith: German mountain dictionary with evidence . Wilhelm Gottlieb Korn, Breslau 1871, p. 441 ( limited preview in Google Book search).

Web links

Wiktionary: soaps  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. a b The mining landscape of Schneeberg and Eibenstock (= values ​​of the German homeland . Volume 11). 1st edition. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1967, p. 169.
  2. ^ Moritz Ferdinand Gätzschmann: Collection of mining expressions , Craz & Gerlach (R. Münnich), Freiberg 1859, p. 59 digitized