Well, I'm currently fostering two suspicions. One, the Original Parker Process described by Gaddy may have been the description of their process for twist tubes, as three iron colors considerably differently. And two, the use of logwood was an "industrial shortcut" which saved time (cycles) at the expense of pattern detail. I've found that at the end of my process logwood has little effect, as the steel is already very black.

All this appears to have been common on higher grade tubes, I suspect it was one of the differentiations between higher and lower grades. It's entirely possibly that some U.S. Maker's methods simply were not refined enough to bring the feature out, thus not coloring them to their full potential.

Or, they did show the feature originally, but the ravages of time and additional recoloring eliminated it. I'm leaning towards this explanation, as I'm sure the buyers (U.S. Agents in Leige) were aware of it, and passed that information to the U.S. Makers. It was, after all, a marketing feature that would denote higher quality tubes.

A while back there was a Wilkes-Barre thread with a set or "Very Fine" tubes I restored with this feature. I'm currently coloring a WB "Extra-Fine" set, their highest available quality. We'll have to see if they show the same feature.


Regards
Ken

Last edited by Ken61; 06/13/17 07:35 AM.

I prefer wood to plastic, leather to nylon, waxed cotton to Gore-Tex, and split bamboo to graphite.