Hand Courtney Grimes '78 a piece of metal and he'll tell you fascinating stories about how it was made, how much heat it can stand and when and why it might fail.

A history and government major at Colby, Grimes is now president and chief metallurgist of Sturbridge Metallurgical Services in Massachusetts, which he started in his garage about nine years ago. Besides an office manager, he employs part-time help and consultants as needed. A modest business profile perhaps, but he's highly respected and has been called "the Ken Burns of modern metallurgy."

Grimes's lab is a 3,700-square-foot magic kingdom of metallurgy. Part museum, part testing facility, part research library, it's a cross between Mr. Wizard's workshop and Dr. Quincy's forensics lab. Grimes's clients are people with questions about the strength, composition, corrosibility or culpability of pieces of metal. He can say if fireplace probes will withstand the temperatures they're designed to measure or if saw blades will stand up in a salt-water environment. In a matter of weeks Grimes's accelerated corrosion tank can produce the environmental equivalent of 10 years of New England winter driving.

Grimes evaluates weld joints and measures the depth of laser etchings. He tests the bio-worthiness of medical implants and can spot metal fatigue at 60 paces. He knows what's wrong (or right) with galvanized nails and why water pump rotors might shoot through the housing, imperiling mechanics or car owners.

A native of Nantucket, Grimes earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Central New England College and set up shop in Sturbridge 16 years ago. As a defect detective he helped Cross Pen troubleshoot leaky pen-points and Hyde Manufacturing determine the right grade of steel for blades, and he served as answer man for a steady flow of clients, from surgical instrument manufacturers to courtroom forensics experts.

He combines an inquiring mind with a gold-coating machine, diamond grinding dust, a scanning electron microscope and scales so sensitive that breathing on them registers the weight of your words. He has enough computer screens for a video arcade.

He occasionally invites seventh graders to his lab and lets them maneuver an electron microscope over a defective computer chip or pacemaker wire. In classrooms he's a magician, levitating objects and demonstrating the power of liquid nitrogen to turn rubber bands brittle and bananas rock hard. Grimes glories in arousing students' intellects and exciting their inquisitiveness. He gets excited himself, talking about passivated stainless steel or the proper way to paint rocket housings to last decades.

Grimes measures things in microns and in degrees Kelvin. He takes photos of things small enough to fit in a gnat's pocket and talks about robots tiny enough to perform tasks inside the human body. He works and plays with scientific miracles that would make Jules Verne's jaw drop.

A visionary, he talks about the impossible as if it were only momentarily delayed and envisions the day when magnetic-levitation transportation will be the norm. "As soon as they can do those things at room temperature, it'll change every motor we now use," he said. "It'll change everything."

Grimes, for one, will be ready and waiting—and probably providing some of the answers.

Adapted from a Southbridge Evening News column by Mark Ashton