Brass with polish> Brooksville craftsman uncovers the beauty buried under years of neglect

Competent, dependable craftsmen who offer necessary services at fair prices can’t help but succeed. Brooksville’s Ken Miltner, who owns and operates Fine Finishes, a metals repair and refinishing business, exemplifies the validity of such a statement.

Miltner, 67, loves what he does. He loves designing and building lighting devices from scratch, designing his own equipment, working with people, and working with brass. “Just being able to take old things and restore them to their original purpose and beauty gives me satisfaction,” he says. Each object brought for repair offers something new. “Not one thing is the same,” he says: “I haven’t become bored yet.”

Originally a partner in a metals plating shop on Long Island, when he moved to Brooksville with his wife, Lois, and three teen-agers in 1973, he had no intention of starting another business. He bought 30 acres of land and built an extended cape on a rise overlooking Penobscot Bay. He and his wife did all the interior finishing of the house and landscaped the grounds.

A tall, rangy man, he radiates energy and enthusiasm as he explains why he started Fine Finishes in 1984. “Having been in metals finishing since high school, I wanted something to do besides working around the place,” he says. “You have to feel productive and useful,” he continues; “I enjoy being active; I have never in my whole life spent a day sitting down.”

When he first advertised his new business, he told his wife, “We’re so remote, I’ll probably work one or two days a week.”

Wrong! He works a six-day week and has enough business to keep two people busy doing everything from rewiring lamps and retinning copper pots and pans to designing one-of-a-kind lighting.

“I love to design things,” he says, “but there’s no time with all the repairs.” He says the time will come, though, when he’ll be able to design more.

Restoring brass to its original beauty is Miltner’s specialty. His long, tidy, cellar shop, built with an especially high ceiling to accommodate his height, is filled with brass of all kinds and ages in various stages of restoration. A huge kerosene chandelier, belonging to a well-known celebrity, rests on the floor just inside his doorway. Next to a shining pair of 18th century lemon-top andirons, some age-dulled hearth equipment lies waiting to be cleaned and polished. Beside the shovels and tongs sits a modern brass and acrylic end table whose lacquered brass is scratched and pitted. A peculiar oval-shaped piece of metal leans against lamp-filled shelves looking rather like a sun visor for a giant. Miltner says it’s a solid brass windshield from a wooden-hulled 1930s speedboat — a rumrunner’s boat he likes to think.

“It’s always something different,” he says; “I get a big kick out of it: it forces you to keep sharp.”

Whether a piece can be restored, Miltner says, depends upon the base metal. That tells him the quality of the piece and what he can and can’t do with it. “If it’s brass, no matter if it’s 300 years old,” he says, “you can do it over and over and over. If the base metal is die-cast or white metal (an alloy with a lot of zinc in it) plated to look like brass, “you’re stuck: the value isn’t there to begin with,” he says. The trick is being able to discern the difference, something Miltner, with his years of experience, can spot from across a room.

His challenges include the design and fabrication of a 5 1/2-foot-long brass lighting device electrified with a dimmer and inset with stained glass panels designed and made by his wife. It’s to go over a kitchen counter eating area. He just finished electrifying and restoring six gas chandeliers to their original light-catching glow. Another customer asked Miltner to electrify a hand-wrought iron candle chandelier. Miltner told the customer that since the arms of the chandelier were solid, he’d have to run the wiring outside.

“That’s OK,” said the customer, “I’m just tired of lighting candles.” The piece now includes two hollow brass spheres: one holds all the wiring from the arms, the other is there for balance.

“Once you get the concept in your head,” Miltner says, “it’s amazing how it grows all by itself: pictures come into your mind and problems solve themselves.”

One problem that’s solving itself is a design to make an old outdoor hand-water pump into a standing lamp. A customer brought Miltner the pump and told him to go for it. The pump lies on the floor near the center of the cellar. Miltner says, “Each time I go by, I look at it and my mind goes `click’ and takes a picture; it’s slowly coming together.”

Another challenge that Miltner conquered hangs from a hook over to the side of the room, protected by a plastic cover. Miltner removed the plastic to display a many-armed brass chandelier, polished, lacquered, and looking like new. Polaroid photos tell the story: the chandelier fell, and when Miltner got it the arms were broken, split, bent at agonizing angles: it looked ready for the dump. Miltner put some 40 hours into its restoration.

Asked how he managed to make all these repairs and fabrications in his cellar without sending things out, he simply walks the customer to his workshop, under the garage, where he keeps his tools. A heavy Arabian tinned brass cauldron nearly 2 feet in height and diameter awaits restoration. He says he had a larger one that was used to boil camel meat and explains that repairing such pots is possible because he designed a piece of equipment to lift heavy objects. In fact, he has designed all his own tools.

All his inventions, he says, “are simple, common sense.” With nothing but an active brain, a high school education, years of experience, and that gift of common sense he’s redesigned and rebuilt an old lathe, designed and built his own dust collector, which he claims is far more efficient and far less expensive than commercial ones. He invented his own lacquering method; in fact, he does everything but plating, which he doesn’t get into because of the pollution involved and because he works at his house.

Miltner talked one of his daughters into making lamp shades she now has her own business in Portland and his wife developed an interest in making stained glass shades through his enthusiasm. “My only regret,” he says, “is that I couldn’t interest my son: the business is there; what we could have done!”