Metalsmithing and Related Topics

Here’s a fun little event I found out about on Facebook. I thought some of you here might like to join in. The idea is to make a bowl and finish it on Super Bowl Sunday, and then upload a picture of it to the Flickr site. Here’s a link with all the information: http://hammermarks.wordpress.com/2010/01…enge-2010/. I plan to watch the game, especially it the Colts are in it, but that won’t be till evening.
I got the sudden inspiration to make a full-moon face, and instead of putting the face on the convex side, putting it on the concave side, so it serves as a bowl and a sculpture at the same time. This was a bit of a challenge, since the curve goes the wrong way, but once I got into it, it all went so well I didn’t want to stop. So, it’s about 90% done, and I’ll set it aside and finish it up at the appropriate time. The bowl is 8″ in diameter and 2″ deep.

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I have always been under the impression that silver was more meleable and ductile than brass. This seems to be the common wisdom. In fact, when people have asked me about it, they usually say something like “isn’t brass a lot harder to work than silver?”, and my reply is something like “Well, yes, but not that much”. I have a lot of experience forming brass, and little with silver, other than making small jewelery items. I recently made a larger silver piece, and I was looking foreward to the ease of forming silver after being used to brass. To my surprise, it was no easier, and I could almost believe it was a little harder, but I was using 18 gauge silver, and I’m used to 16 gauge brass, so I decided it was not a fair comparison.
Then a few days ago, I decided to make a silver “bird in flight” ornament, like the brass ones I have made and told about here. After some unsuccessful attempts with 22 gauge silver, I decided to make two, one silver and one brass, both of them 20 gauge, which is what I normally use for the brass ones. I noticed at the very first stage, where the head is punched for the first time, the silver one would not stretch as far as the brass one. When I got to the next stage, after annealing, the head on the silver one split open rather than stretching (see the picture), while the brass one stretched just fine. This is the first side-by-side comparison I’ve had, and it turns the common wisdom on it’s head.
The alloys used were cartridge brass (alloy 260) and sterling silver. I should try it with fine silver to see how it compares, although I don’t really want to spend that much money on something that is likely to fail. Do any of you out there know if fine silver is that much more malleable than sterling?

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This is a piece I made to enter in the Saul Bell Design Awards competition. One of my few forays into silver, very expensive for me, but I thought it might be worth the expense. Unfortunately it did not make the cut; I guess it’s too traditional-looking, and not really innovative in any way, which is what they want. I may enter it somewhere else if I can find an appropriate venue (any suggestions?). Following is the description from my entry.
This piece is 7 inches tall and 7 inches across at the base. It is three separate pieces which fit loosely together. The bowl and lid are sterling silver with LOS patina and satin finish, and the base is brass, finished the same way. I call it five-way because there are five different ways it can be used or displayed: (1) The lid by itself as a sculpture, (2) The bowl by itself, (3) the bowl on the stand without the lid, (4) the bowl with lid without the stand, and (5) the complete three-piece set.
My design for this set was inspired by some work I had just done previously. I had made a frog on a lotus leaf sculpture, and someone suggested that it would look nice as a lid on a dish or bowl. I had made a tall candlestick with trilateral symmetry, and one element of that was inspiration for the stand. The base of the stand, with the three tapered curving pieces are reminiscent of growing plant roots. The bowl, although I had a general idea of what it would look like did not take its final form, with the juxtaposed positive and negative forms, until it was mostly formed.
All three pieces were made from flat sheet, using raising techniques. The stand is made from three pieces of brass the lower part of each formed into a spiculum or conical tube shape, and silver soldered, then the three pieces were joined together with silver solder. The bowl and the lid are each one piece, and were formed with hammers, punches, and stakes. No pitch was used in the process.

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I guess this is repousse, although I do it a little differently than the norm. I don’t use pitch, because I hate the mess, and I prefer to be able to work from both sides, switching back and forth readily. The first four pictures show the beginning stages, with just wood for backup. The material I’m using is 16 gauge brass. It’s punched and hammered from the back, and then pushed in around the edges in front. The last picture shows how far I was able to go with it before it needed to be annealed.

There were several repeats of this process of hammering, punching, annealing to get to the degree of three-dimensionality that I wanted. The pictures just show a few of the steps. The next pictures show a new technique I discovered, using a very short stake that just protrudes above the stump enough to be useful, and make it easy to hold the piece to work on it. This one is being used to shape the legs.

Here’s another similar tool I used to get an undercut around the edges, especially the front of the head.

In the next picture I’m planishing the body, using a more ordinary stake. I didn’t try to planish the legs; I knew that would get me into a world of trouble. Then hammering the texture into the background.

Then the finished piece, front and back.

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I posted pics of one of these before, here,  but this time (this one is #5), I took pictures while I made it so I can show how it was made. The first five pictures show (1) The three blanks, cut out and annealed, (2) pushing the metal into a groove to start the tube shape, (3) forming the top part, (4) hammering the tube closed, (5) the three parts, seams silver-soldered, and pickled, ready for the next stage.

Next we have the process of twisting the three elements into one. The metal is very soft from the heat of soldering, so it twists pretty easily. It’s thick enough metal (16 gauge) so that crimping or kinking is not an issue. After it’s twisted together, it has to be soldered, just enough to make it solid; two small spots of solder on the back is all that’s required.

Now the flower petals are given their graceful form, then we see the almost completed piece, with the bottom ends marked for cutting, and then the hanger attached to the back. Some final planishing smooths out the surface before buffing.

The finished piece, hanging on a wall. It’s about 13″ tall.

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I first thought about making a bird in flight using my one-piece technique as with my previous birds, quite a long time ago, but was hung up on having the seam lengthwise as before, and came to a dead end for how to do it. I had pretty much given up on the idea until a few weeks ago, while waking breifly during the night, the solution suddenly popped into my head. Fortunately I remembered it in the morning, and was able to start working on the idea. It turned out to be mostly a tooling project, and took quite a long while to get the tooling and techniques correct. This first picture shows all my failures.

One of the biggest problems was breaking through at the beak end of the head, so I had to develop several stages of punching the head, with annealing between each stage. These next five pictures show the process from first annealing (flat blank) to the point where it’s ready for second annealing.

The wood die in the pictures has a large hole at one end and a smaller hole at the other end. All the rest of the steps shown are done at the smaller one. The next picture shows it punched with a slightly smaller hemispherical punch, again ready for annealing. Next, punch is same diameter, but bullet-shaped, and ready for annealing again. Then we have the most elaborate tool I’ve made so far, to finish the shaping of the head.

Next, using that fancy tool, I shape the rest of the body and the tail. Then some hammering to get it ready to silver-solder the seam. Then we see the seam soldered.

The next steps are pretty mundane: filing, grinding, sanding, polishing, attaching a jump ring to the back. Here’s the final result:

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It’s been about two years since my first try, and I’ve tried several times since then to make an interesting fish shape using the same method I use for my birds. The biggest problem was that I wanted the fish to be curved, to make it more dynamic and interesting, and that turned out to make it infinitely more complicated than a straight fish would be. After several failed tries, I realized I was going to have to have a better way to create the pattern for the flat piece that it starts with. I finally came up with a method that works fairly well: make a clay model, and dip it in dip seal. Dip seal is a flexible rubbery plastic stuff that melts at 360f and makes a nice coating, which can be cut at the same place the seam will go, then removed from the clay model. This can then be flattened out, more or less, onto a piece of paper, and the outline traced with a pencil, yielding a pattern for cutting out the metal piece.

The first three pictures show the clay model before and after dipping, and the dip seal pattern removed and ready to use.

The next three pictures show the annealed flat piece I started with, then when it was ready for the second annealing, and the third annealing.

The next pictures show a little bit of the hammering, and the piece further along, ready for annealing again.

Then, some more hammering, closing it up. It took four separate soldering steps to complete the seam.

Once the piece was soldered I did a lot more hammering to refine the shape, and planishing to get a nice smooth surface. The finished piece, on a smooth table top, will rock and wiggle around like a fish out of water when given a little nudge.

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I haven’t posted here in quite a while. I’ve been working on a lot of experiments that have mostly ended up enlarging my collection of scrap. This moon face is an idea I’ve had in my head for a couple years, and I finally got around to making it. I think it turned out pretty well. I know it’s not really that original, the image has been around for centuries, but I think maybe the medium might have some originality, that is, forming flat metal into a totally three dimensional crescent moon face.
I have shown the progression here from start to finish, skipping over most of the minute details. I made a hardwood form (seen in picture #4) just for this project to help in forming the anticlastic curvature. Much of the inward hammering was done on this form.
The first four pictures show the beginnings, flat piece, hammering the nose outward, hammering non-nose areas inward. In the fifth image it’s ready for annealing.

In the next three pictures we have the piece after a lot more hammering, ready to anneal again, then, hammering to create the curvature necessary to join it at the back, then, after having hammered every part of it, it’s ready for annealing again.

Then there’s a lot more hammering, refining the form and getting the seam closed. the next picture shows that process at one of the pointed ends. Then it’s ready for silver-soldering. The last picture shows a spring clamp used for holding the seam closed at one of the ends.

After soldering, the seam gets cleaned up, any excess solder removed and sanded and polished smooth. Then the whole thing is planished, then buffed, cleaned, and given a liver of sulfur patina, then rubbed down with #00 steel wool. The last three pictures show the finished piece. It’s 8″ from point to point.

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I started an Etsy shop about a week ago, and put up all my usual pieces, which are way too expensive for the typical Etsy shopper. I did it on the sage advice of someone who is very successful at internet marketing, the idea being that it is very inexpensive advertising. After thinking about it a while, I was able to come up with something that is more in the Etsy price range, it’s a tiny bird, made the same way as my other bird I recently showed here, http://shelbyvision.ganoksin.com/blogs/2009/08/18/hammer-formed-brass-bird-sculpture-how-it-was-made/. Since it’s so small (the bird is 3″ long), there’s much less time involved in making it. Hopefully I can come up with more ideas for inexpensive pieces.

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