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I Forge Iron

azurefire

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Everything posted by azurefire

  1. also if you want to blacken the seem and entire peice gun blue hides solder seems. also on silver you can hide it by depletion gilding.
  2. when possible avoid using leaded solder on silver. it causes a eutectic reaction at a very low temperature and can destroy the piece during later repair attempts if you have a few pictures of the piece before you jb welded it it might help. you can test to a certain degree the solders makeup using acids and a reference piece and watching the reaction. chances are unless it was a extremely poorly crafted piece it would have been made using a silver solder. i have actually seen a beautiful silver hollow bracelet ruined because the refractory bed it was being soldered on contained a small piece of leaded solder( which burned a hole through it) so if you post a pick we could help you a bit more
  3. personally in my experience hot working sterling silver can be a bit iffy. its a hot short alloy so it can have a tendency to crack if overheated and can even due to the difference in its liquidus and solidus point it can break easily. fine silver( and 97% up) as well as the eutectic alloy of 72% forge quite nice as well as copper and some brass bronze alloys depending on the composition. also the copper content in silver makes it very liable to firescale so even annealing should be done with great care to prevent the need for depletion guilding later.so cold working was the best bet for a piece like this. if you want to finish it up to a shine you could get a matte finish by brass brushing or sand though 1200 grit on sand paper(3m's rocks) or my favorite tumble in steel shoot for a few hours and it will just shine
  4. hey im a art metals student at umass Dartmouth looking for feedback on designs and construction mechanisms for straight razors. a few months ago i formed this straight razor using both forging and stock removal. there are some obvious defects such as the shaft being un proportional and the blade being to wide however thats set in stone and im not changing it. however now i am in the process of designing a handle for this blade. i have been trying to figure out a good mechanism for building the folder. the plan i have came up with so far has been to make the entire handle out of 6 layers of 16 gauge copper. i would first construct using the inner most layer a skeleton with 3 rivets( not marked but 2 on back spine one at top and possibly one front side below the blade to terminate the motion of the folder. the other two layers are going to make the framework for the Champlevé enamel drawn. these two plates which will be soldered together and fused by the enamel after composition will be riveted through the entire handle through respective tube spacers. i am intending to use this image to create a resist so i can electro pierce through galvanic etching to produce the cells in which my Champlevé will rest. everything dark will be where the resist is applied except for the places with the cross hatching going through it which i will manually apply a different color resist so that i can use them as a guide to keep my rivets lined up for the mechanism the fulcrum for the blade has been posing an bit of a challenge as the hole in the blade seems to small for a spacer tube to be passed and have room for a adequately strong rivet to be passed through. so im trying to find a way to insert the fulcrum without compressing the sheath against the blade as a rivet with out a spacer would. on top of this i am hoping to be able to set using the same rivet to bezels on eacher side of the fulcrum that will house two lapis lazuli cabs represented by the circle in the drawing. so here is what i am looking for input on( input on anything would be wonderful but these are the things im really trying to figure out). 1 i have a feeling the profile of my design might be a bit visually heavy and unbalanced( i like the form based off the anti radial curves im using but that made me go bigger which is part of the problem) so does the profile work and if not what can i do to improve it and reduce its weight. 2 i really want to find a mechanism that will keep it closed and that will limit the range it can open 3 how should i solve the previously described fulcrum situation 4are there any procedural or aesthetic concerns you have with this design or any thing i could simplify down thank you for your feed back -David Pogue
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