Day 32 - Smelting
The furnace and bellows
The previous day I did some kick / punch bag work to shake off my cold. Somehow I managed to pull a muscle in my shoulder. Mikey is still in pain with his broken ribs, J has ‘possum flu’ and is not alone. We are all feeling a bit rough.

I also feel very emotional today. I love it here on the West coast and don’t want to leave. This is the beginning of our last programme here in New Zealand. I want to be with Liz again. It will be nice to see my family, but the scenery, the friends I have met and the freedom I have experienced will be badly missed.

We are set the challenges: make something out of the gold that we have got so far. It’s not so easy. Although we have gold, much of it is composed of powder, flakes and impurities. We need a furnace and bellows to smelt the gold. Smelting isn’t as simple as melting. There is chemistry to removing unwanted contaminating metals from gold. Luckily my contribution to the task is to produce two sets of bellows. Not much chemistry there, but there is science. For anything to burn properly oxygen is needed. The furnace will need to be insulated so we need to force oxygen into it somehow. I’m happy to help build the furnace, especially as my Dad was a bricklayer, but Mikey gets plenty of help from the others, leaving me to sew the bellows together.

I go back to the bellows. I want them to take oxygen from the atmosphere and pump it into the furnace. There is no point in blowing then sucking because I wouldn’t be adding any oxygen. In addition there it the risk of burning the bellows if they suck in any hot coals or gasses. In order to achieve this I construct a reed valve. The morning goes well, although is a typical day 1 – no chance of getting on with much work because of all the filming.

We get back to the hut for our evening meal. Mikey finds out that he has got a punctured lung in addition to his broken ribs and feels really rough. J feels very ill too so goes to bed. Kathy, J and Ellen turn up. We all feel tired and ill.

Day 33 - Smelting
Being TV6, the last programme in the series, most of the tools are broken or missing. Our resources are very low, so old projects are cannibalised for wood, screws, nuts and bolts. Everything we make is designed around the materials available.

The weather is great, just like a British summer day, even so, when we try to light some coal it is too wet to get it going. We are running out of time. Kate and some of the crew help me to spread a tarpaulin on the floor and spread the coal out in the sun to dry. Getting a furnace going isn’t as easy as just lighting a fire. The whole of the inside needs to heat up, and that takes time.

I make a thermometer out of a brick and some small pieces of metal. It is based on the principle that different metals melt at different temperatures. Lead melts at about 330°C, aluminium at 660°C, brass at 1027°C, gold at 1062°C and copper at 1083°C. If the copper in my ‘thermometer’ melts then the gold in the crucible should also have melted. The other metals indicate how close we are to the temperature that we want. However we have two problems. Firstly the metals that I use are likely to be alloys (mixtures of metals) so the melting temperatures will be different. Secondly we were unable to get the ‘thermometer’ into the middle of the furnace. Even so, it will give an indication of the temperatures inside the furnace.

Eventually we get some coal to burn in an open fire and drop it into the furnace. On top of the hot coals we mount a grill on which we place the crucible of gold. We then take it in turns to pump the bellows to get the fire burning nice and hot. I didn’t expect them to last long, but with the exception of a couple of broken broomstick handles they are OK for the whole day. The only other problem was when a hot piece of coal was sucked into Kate’s bellows setting the leather on fire when the reed valve became stuck. This problem is solved by pouring water on the pipe leading from the bellows to the furnace, which cools anything sucked into the bellows before it can reach the leather. After a while we check my ‘thermometer’ the results are inconclusive, so J came up with the idea of poking a copper olive (used by plumbers) right down into the furnace next to the gold. Two minutes after putting the olive into the furnace it has melted, leaving only the steel wire to which it had been tied. We now know that we are up to temperature so keep the furnace going until the fuel runs out. As late afternoon develops into dusk the flames shooting out of the furnace chimney look stunning against the snow capped mountains. We know that we were in business.

There is no point burning ourselves trying to retrieve the gold this evening so we leave the furnace to cool naturally.

Back at the huts we were to share our last meal with Ricky. He made a local speciality – whitebait. Here on the west coast whitebait is nearly as valuable as gold. People will fight to the death to defend their own fishing areas because the catch can be so lucrative. We ask what Franz Josef has made of us. Ricky replies, "Better people". I think that he is right.

Day 34 - Smelting
Our last filming day in New Zealand
At the sawmill we find out that the smelting has worked, but maybe not as perfectly as we had hoped. We now have purified gold inside a glass casing, but it is not in one nugget – bummer! We can’t very well make jewellery out of little bits of pure gold. We will now need to cast it, or at least melt it into one piece.

Mike and I re-light the furnace. The bellows are still OK - sort of - but because we didn’t have time to let the lining dry properly before lighting the furnace the previous day the clay has now cracked. This could affect the insulation that is needed to obtain high internal temperatures. A heavy shower arrives. It is a pain sitting outside in the rain. J suggests generating heat using a carbon arc, much like an arc welder. I hope that it works. He disappears into the sawmill with a car battery to provide electricity, some automobile jump leads to connect his device, and two carbon rods that he removed from a flat flashlight battery. Within minutes sparks are flying (literally) and the tips of the carbon rods are glowing. He melts the gold, but because of the method he is using, the surface of the gold nugget produced is ‘pock marked’. I suggest flashing a gas-welding torch across it to melt the surface but J doesn’t want to ‘cheat’. He takes to polishing the gold while Mikey and I chill out. The result is a shiny gold whitebait looking pendant. Ellen and Kathy produce lovely solid gold earrings.

The programme ends successfully. We are all getting on well. We have gold jewellery and hope that we have made a great series.

That evening we hold a ‘wrap party’ (a party to celebrate the end of filming - "It's a wrap!"). I usually find most such parties pretty tiresome. This party is different though – way different. The ‘influential people’ and the ‘local helpers’ are friends. We are constantly told that we are ‘almost locals’, ‘honorary locals’, that we will be ‘missed badly’, that the town ‘won’t be the same without us’. Gradually the music is turned up a little. The pub is heaving with people, all of whom we know. It was probably Kathy who started dancing, I don’t know. I’m not far behind, and within minutes half the people in the pub are dancing to Irish jigs one minute, contemporary British dance music the next. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is enjoying themselves. It’s among the best parties of any sort that I have ever been to. What a place! What a great bunch of people. I’ll miss so many of the characters that I have met. As for the BBC posse? I’d like to think that after ‘Rough Science Three’, we are in a lot better shape than after filming the second series. Respect is due to Steve Evanson for holding such an unlikely group together very much against the odds. In a way one of our regular helicopter pilots summed us up. He said, "There are film crews and then there are crews that film. You’re a great crew that happens to film". Cool! Nice one Tucky.

I like being with my friends again, but I’m not sure that I like being back in the UK. It has been difficult being away from Liz for so long, but I will miss New Zealand’s West coast for a long time.

I sit in ‘rural’ England and listen to the constant hiss of tyres as cars drive along a distant road. Planes fly overhead, kids shout and scream in a neighbour’s garden, a lawn mower drones on in another. Thanks to light pollution I can only see a fraction of the stars that would have been visible in New Zealand, even on a clear summer night in the Cotswolds. And the English countryside? Even the most beautiful and scarcely populated areas are - what can I say - sanitised. There is little or no wilderness left in the whole of the UK, let alone the south of England. Compared to the South Island we live in a synthetic world, which is so overcrowded that true freedom, the ability to do what we want as long as no harm is caused, is an illusion. Half of me wants to fit right in here again but a good part of me doesn’t.

Content last updated: 18/07/2006