this was bought at an auction the other day. 1) because it felt like a nice casting, covered in a thick layer of crud on the sides and bottom, but nice cooking surface and kind of lightweight, despite the crud. and 2) it was cheap.
I let it sit in the lye bath for about 24 hours and pulled it out to check on it and it looked almost exactly the same.. .the crust was very carbonized... so, plan B, went to the e-tank... a couple of hours and some foamy black gunk floating up... and then some additional scraping and poking and steel wooling... and I found a wagner (I believe arc/arc... pitting kind of conceals most of the sidney, but there are some letters there and appear to be in an arc)... the odd part is the 'A' over there at about 3 oclock... pattern maker's mark? early version of a pattern identifier?
https://imgur.com/gallery/XqmrbRK
I let it sit in the lye bath for about 24 hours and pulled it out to check on it and it looked almost exactly the same.. .the crust was very carbonized... so, plan B, went to the e-tank... a couple of hours and some foamy black gunk floating up... and then some additional scraping and poking and steel wooling... and I found a wagner (I believe arc/arc... pitting kind of conceals most of the sidney, but there are some letters there and appear to be in an arc)... the odd part is the 'A' over there at about 3 oclock... pattern maker's mark? early version of a pattern identifier?
https://imgur.com/gallery/XqmrbRK