posted 05-12-2005 03:26 PM            

I am a museum curator, and I've just started studying our collection of locally-made silver. We do not currently have a scale to weigh large pieces of hollowware, and we have just acquired a piece of silver by Kunkle--a maker whose work is, from what I can determine, fairly obscure.
I do hope this clears up any concerns you might have.

posted 05-12-2005 05:41 PM            

Unfortunately I do not have any information on Kenton C. Kunkle but hopefully some of the others here will. There is a great deal of knowledge to tap into with many of the folks on the forum.

To try to answer your question on what might be a good scale to use, there are a number of choices but my personal experience is with Ohaus brand scales. I have no affiliation with this company at all. You can see their range of offerings at their corporate website ohaus.com and you can find all kinds of companies selling their scales and those of their competitors on the web. One of the factors you will need to keep in mind in selecting a scale is the range of weights you will expect to measure. If you are trying to measure things with relatively low weights, such as small jewelry, you will want an "analytical" scale which has a little enclosure around the weighing pad to stop the fluctuations from slight air movement in the room. These will only measure weights up to about half a pound or so. If you have heavier items such as a plate or candlestick, you will want to find a "precision" scale which can weight things up to several pounds. The down side to these is they will not be able to tell you the really tiny differences in weight that an analytical scale can give, but for curating larger objects I'm not sure you would need to know the weight down to the hundreths of a gram.

You can find scales in both digital and mechanical varieties. Digital are easier to use - you just put the object on the pad and voila the readout tells you the exact number, but mechanical scales can (like a triple beam balance scale) cost less but make you do the old fashioned work of moving the little weights around like on an old fashioned doctor's scale until the scale balances and then you add up the numbers to get the weight.

posted 07-03-2010 09:00 AM            

Kenton Clark Kunkle was born in August of 1861 in Ohio and has patents related to agricultural equipment that were received around 1890 in that state.

In the 1900 census, Kenton is listed in Bellvue, Kentucky with the occupation mallet spinner if I'm reading the long hand writing correctly. In the 1910 census, he is listed in the same town with the occupation silversmith in the jewelry industry. In 1917 while still living in Bellvue, Kentucky, he received a patent for a jeweler's blowpipe.

In the 1920 census, he is listed in Sycamore, Ohio where he was working as a silversmith in a jewelry factory. In the 1930 census, he is listed in Deerpark,
Ohio where he was working as a toolmaker in a jewelry factory. He is listed in Cincinnati directories from 1936 to 1940 as a silversmith. I don't find him in the 1941 Cincinnati directory, but that probably just means I don't have access to the right publishers directory for that year.

Kenton C Kunkle died February 2, 1941 in Hamilton County, Ohio.