Topic: caithness paul ysart weight

[RAY]

well i got this one for a snip on ebay the description was next to nothing, i thought it was something else until it arrived today, looked on the base it's signed PY C11G  a second or a prototype? because I've not seen one of these by Caithness, it's made up of  cane's bit's and also it has some gold and copper aventurine ,  with 6 indentations with a bubble in the center , it has a flat highly polished base and measures 2.5" high and 2.75" across, it has a cane which i have not seen before in Caithness or any Scottish weight before , it only can be seen on the inside..marked as this one

click thumbnails

[Mod: As at Aug 2011, none of the original photobucket images showed the correct item, but some showed genuine, personal photos. Hence, all the links have now been deleted.]

[Frank]

Clearly a fake set of marks!

[RAY]

hi Frank

what make's you say that? but it had crossed my mind, but why would someone mark it as C11G?

[Frank]

Well, CIIG is used as a second mark. There are no PY seconds. Nobody at Caithness would make such a mess of it either :-)

It looks like they tried to copy the PY sig on my site but were to unused to the tool to stop and start it in the right place - or just as likely too stupid to be able to copy well.

[RAY]

it's scratched signed Frank, i know that Caithness did scratch sign the 2nd's in the early years, put all that a side, is it a caithness? i'm sure there is some ysart canes in there but we will need Kevin to comment on them, what do you think of the odd cane in the 1st photo?, i dont think it's Scottish

[KevinH]

I guess this could have been an experimental item that was not taken up as a production piece. The PY part of the signing was not, in my view, done by Paul Ysart as the "P" is quite different from how Paul formed it. Possibly the whole signing was done by a person at Caithness when it was decided to offer the weight through the shop outlet as a Caithness Second (but not necessarily a Paul Ysart second).

The individual canes that Ray shows all look like Scottish to me, even the orange-green-yellow one which might be a very early Ysart cane that is more often seen in Vasart work.

Some weights of this type (but without the bubbles) are known to have been made at Paul's Harlland works. This was confirmed by Willie Manson who said that at one time the glass batch was ruined (it was virtually black!) but rather than waste it, they made a whole run of surface decorated scrambled weights. So far I have only seen one of those, but there may be lots around, simply unrecognised. The one I saw did not have easily identifiable canes!

[Frank]

Since then we know that C11G was not just used for seconds but almost certainly for letting items be sold in factory shop at reduced rate.