Help Identifying Old Iron Sconces

Is there a way to distinquish old iron sconces from newer ones. I have 2 that hang on the wall that a oil lamp would of sat on. I do believe they are old but need help to make sure. Thanks, Sandy

Accurately, you can use nuclear techniques. Anything cast since the '50s will show some traces of contamination from atmospheric nuke tests.

It's quite easy to distinguish old high-quality cast iron from modern stuff, but hard to tell low quality work apart. There used to be a market for high quality cast iron, but this is now replaced by other techniques and almost all modern cast iron is cheap. It's still hard though to tell modern work from old wotk that was simply poorly done.

Melt metal has changed. High quality is homogeneous, low quality is greyer and porous. Filing a surface will show this. Chemistry may also show age - old cast iron was a primary material, from freshly refined iron. Modern cast iron is largely made from scrap steel, so any trace of aluminium or chromium (or some other alloying ingredients) will be a giveaway.

Old castings were all sand-cast by hand. Modern castings may use machine casting (still in sand) or even lost-foam (probably not for decorative work though). The mould lines are often distinctive; hand moulding uses simple part lines and more core boxes, machine mould making may vary the part line in rectangular steps, but avoids loose cores. Draw (taper, to make patterns easier to remove from moulds) may be increased on modern castings, as this makes them easier to mould.

Fettling technique is often easiest to spot. Old castings had mould lines that were removed by hand filing. Modern castings will be done on a belt linisher, and this leaves a more regular, but often less accurately placed, finish.

Are they marked?

The newer ones are much lighter, are recasts (with ragged-type edges) and are most often marked 'Japan'. Many were made during the 1960s/1970s, when pseudo-Victorian came into fashion during the Hippie/Mod era.

Andy, thanks so much but HUH! You evidently are in this field. Not sure why you are called dingbat. Would someone who knows metallurgy be able to decifer what you said? I know one of them. Maybe they will have some nuclear techniques they know. Will a black light tell any of the contamination you are talking about? Sandy

Ok, go and find some genuinely old stuff and some genuinely new stuff, both without paint. Now hold them both up together and look around the edges of the casting. Although I've clearly failed to explain the details, they're quite obvious when you have both to compare side-by-side. Pay particular attention to how they cleaned up the raw castings, by hand or by machine.

Then smash both of them. On a freshly broken surface it's usually obvious. For modern woodworking machine tools you can even tell if a casting was made in Taiwan or China by what it looks like when you've dropped it.