GinZaikuShi

I melted copper pennies into molten aluminum in a little paint can foundry once. It took forever, stirring with the AL at a constant temp. With pouring silver onto copper, I'd be more afraid that the copper wouldn't get hot enough to bond or swirl into the metal. Maybe I could preheat the copper or something. Do you think I should be using flux when doing this? I haven't cut into my ingots, but they don't at all look like the first two I poured. Know anyting about silver plating? I got a box of bold flat nails. I want to silver plate them and make them into rings. I need some more colored metals to play around with. I got a job today, so I don't think I'll be able to do much casting the next few days. Lame.

I've actually gone through 2 crucibles so far. The first one was a section of a titanium alloy bike stem that I cut off and stuffed a bunch of red mud and refractory clay in the bottom of. It lasted about three pours. On the third pour, the shaft was so brittle that it crumbled in the tongs. The second crucible was a piece of steel pipe tack welded to a piece of steel plate, again with the bottom filled with mud and clay. It lasted 2-3 weeks, a few dozen pours. The problem is that the steel scales away in the forge and the walls of the crucible get thinner and thinner. I'm sure there is also some cross contamination from the oxidizing steel. This third one is pretty much an improvement on the 2nd. Thicker steel pipe, thicker plate. Welded the seam all the way around, then on the inside, then a bigger weld on the outside a second time on top of the first weld. It's bigger than the second and holding up nicely. Was able to fill it with about 40 copper pennies and some scrap copper sheet. As for PPE, I do need to figure out a better place to do my casting, and build a purpose built foundry for the process. I pour into big wooden molds that are painted with wet blasting clay and let to dry next to the opening of the forge until they're a bit charred. I've had no problem even pouring into a wet wooden mold. I've been sprayed with molten silver a few times when attempting to make silver mokume. It cools down fast and just stings a little. haha. I've got a look at my ingots, and they're just big chunks of Shibuichi. I'll end up using them, but I'm still disappointed. There seems to be a key temperature for doing the pour. The copper needs to be hot enough to melt the silver and bond the silver to the copper, but the copper must cool before the silver can be incorporated into an alloy. I think this just means smaller, faster pours. To try and get a big ingot, I filled the crucible with copper and let it melt and filled it more, like three times. It was way too hot and in the forge too long. The crucible was yellow, I usually pour when the crucible matches the orange of the forge. And then it's still a bit cooler, since I usually give it a stir before pouring. I guess if I'm going to try and pour that much copper, I need to let it cool a bit after coming out of the forge. Or I can just do one heat and make small billets. I also wonder what would happen if I poured some very hot silver over copper scraps. I just filled my mold with 925 silver scraps and some shibuichi scraps.

My friend did get this awesome picture of me pouring though.

Not a great day for casting today. Broke through my crucible today. made another with what was laying around. Did two big ingots probably 4-5 Toz each. Problem: I think I got the copper too hot in the forge. The ingots don't really have a pattern. I think the silver might have just incorporated into the copper, and I just made an alloy. I have really bad eyesight though, so I'll find out when they come out of the pickle.

Would the brass really have that sort of effect? I'm not making an alloy, I'm kind of forge weld cheating. The copper and the silver didn't combine, I'm not sure if the brass would. Even if the brass did alloy with the silver, wouldn't it only be in small spots (assuming i'm using a lot of silver scrap and a small amount of brass scrap)?

I'm thinking sprinkles in the mold, before adding the silver and shibuichi. The hope would be that the piece would be patterned copper, silver, sibuichi, with a random speckling of brass. I saw this Mokume bracelet the other day while browsing Google Images. I really like it. It doesn't really have a pattern, but I think a look like this could easily be produced the way i've been talking about. I think it could serve to have more colors, personally, and I like something a little more fluid than hectic. http://jerrycblanchard.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/contemporarymokumebracelet/

This billet was with 925 sterling scraps, cut up into about quarter inch squares. I picked up a nice lot of silver coins though, and i'll be melting down all the junk rosy dimes for my next batch (Don't worry, I checked for rare dates and kept them). I'm going to try for a billet with Shibuichi and 900 silver scraps, and maybe a sprinkle of brass shavings from my grinder. I wish I had a bit of gold or shakudo shavings to throw in.

Having something similar to mokume out of the mold would be really cool and cut down on forging time. I'm still expecting to have to work the pattern in somewhat, though. I'm going to take that larger raw billet and square it up and see how many twists I can get in it. I think if I got a lot of nice, tight twists, it would look pretty much like I went though the reular mokume process.

Pictures. The first three are a piece that I cut from the larger ingot, squared and polished. In the 4th picture, you can see the raw ingot. They've been pickled for a few hours. As you can see, there's a nice contrast between the two metals, but not much of a pattern. I'm going to try and modify the process to produce a cast mokume gane. The piece is really small. I didn't want to waste any materials on an experiment that might not have worked. I think all together this is about 10 g of silver and 30 g of copper.

I've been experimenting with casting lately, seeing what sorts of alloys, shapes, and colors I can make with what is laying around my shop. Yesterday I did an experiment. I filled a wood mold with cut up silver scraps, and poured molten copper into the mold. What I got was an ingot of two distinct colors, swirled, with what seems to be a near perfect diffusion (I've been old and hot working the piece and haven't had any separation between the layers). This first piece was cast in a bowl shaped mold and is mostly silver on one side and mostly copper on the other, with the swirlin where they meet. I tried to give the resulting ingot a twist, to give it some more contrast on its faces. I believe my next cast will be in a recangular mold, with the scrap silver laid out in lines or some sort of pattern. I'm hoping that the pattern of the silver laid out in the mold will be somewhat preserved in the finished ingot. Does anyone have any experience with this sort of casting? I tried doing a few google searches on the subject and came up with nothing. Maybe my phrasing wasn't quite right. If anyone has any suggestions on creating better patterns, I'm all ears.

Haven't got a clue, scrap. My friend gave it the spark test and said it looked okay.

Made my first knife today (at least my first attempt without my Bladesmith Buddy standing over my shoulder). Made the blade the boring way (draw filing), heat treated in a mini-keg gas forge, oil quech, tempered in a oven. And this is how it came out. I attempted to give the bevel a hamon by painting on an ash/clay slurry before heat treating. I'll be sharpening and polishing tomorrow to see if that actually worked. I like the handle plain, but might give it a handle for a friend made of some shiuichi and african black wood. I'm not entirely happy with how long the bevel is, I feel like it should be shorter to keep with a traditional aesthetic.

It's on there pretty well. Couldn't rub it off, cleaned it with alcohol. It feels like a powder coat.

Black penny. Will probably flatten it out into sheet and use it for a knife handle.

More and more questions.... I put two large pennies in my pickle to give it some copper content (Copper II Chloride). I just pulled them out and washed them off and saw something pretty cool. One penny is still copper colored, the other is a deep, matte black. From what I can find on the internet, as far as the metal content of these pennies, is that the black one has 1% more tin than the other. Besides that, they seem to be indentical. If anyone has a good knowledge of chemistry and can help me figure out how to repeat this, please speak up. Black copper and white Shibuichi would make a wonderful contrast on a knife handle. I will try and get a picture up tonight. This black finish appears to be more "black" than a Liver of Sulpher "black-brown" finish.

Here is my first piece of Shibuichi. It's a 25/75 mix of silver and bronze. I did accound for the ten percent copper of the coins. It's been forged down to about a .5 mm sheet and reduction gilded in a acid solution that I made. the acid does some interesting things, first it eats away at all the surface copper and the piece looks like sterling, then the surface turns a beautiful bright white. Hard to see in this picture, but this piece is white, pickled for a few hours. The back side was sanded down, so it's still got that goldist/copperish Shibuichi color. I've started working with my piece that had manganese in it. I've noticed some interesting things. It retains a grey color when sanded, darker than silver but with that silver luster. It doesn't seem to need to be annealed as much as straight shibuichi, and anneals well at a blue/purple temper color. Any more than that and it seems to get crumbly. It works different than copper or silver, more like nickel, very stiff. '

For the last week, I've been playing around with making Shibuichi. I've done a few different combinations, from melting down old war nickels to weighing out a few silver dimes and melting them down in scrap copper. I have a few questions to improve my casts. - Would the use of bronze, as opposed to a more pure copper, taint my alloy? - I've seen some vidoes of people making Shibuichi, casting into boiling water. What is the reason for this? I've been casting in open air onto a brick of rammed earth. - I've heard not to use Muriatic acid when pickling silver, but that it's good to use on Copper. How does it do with a mixture? Should I use sulphuric instead? - Although it looks like most of it was left in the crucible after casting, I believe some of my Shibuichi has a bit of manganese in them (from the war nickels). Any idea how this might effect patination and working of the alloy? Thanks ML

Oh I've already learned about that the hard way. I got sprayed with molten silver pretty badly on the face and hands. Got some brass in my shoe today. I can't get my friend to send me these pictures directly, so here are some links.

Do you have any suggestions on silver/copper mokume? I've been trying to do it the same way as the nicke/copper stacks, but it just isn't working. Even the slightest tap from the hammer is squeezing out the silver, and I can't seem to keep it at the right temp. It's always too hot. The silver smith my friend works for ordered a couple 1x3 20 gauge pieces of silver/copper, and said she would put me in contact with her other jeweler friends, if it went well.

Ah, so they're just like our 5 cenbt pieces. Sucessfully made a quarter billet today, shaped it and flattened it into a sheet. My production time is going down slowly, but surely. Also took the little dime billet and gave it a twist. Will post some pictures tomorrow, in the day light.

I won't claim to know any chemistry, I was terrible at it in school. How it was explained to me, was that the mix is unstable until a bit of copper is added. Apparently it produces a bit of chlorine gas. So a few shavings are added right off the bat to stabalize it quickly. Like I said, I don't know though. Most of this info came from a second year chem student, who thinks I'm reckless. haha.

Copper Chloride is the only thing I've really done any etching with. It's cheap (Muriatic + Hydro peroxide + copper shavings), and one batch is a lifetime supply. I used some to etch my buddy's maker's mark into a copper stamp. Took about 3 hours to get about a half mil deep. I know it's good to use on copper, brass, bronze, and nickel, but I didn't know about different metals etching at different rates. I love the look of this deep etched lighter.

Almost all the coins I have are pre 1960. The pennies I have are mostly from the 1880s to the 1940s , they switched to the small pennies in 1971 when they decimalized the currency. Want to grab any before I melt them down, Mr Coin Collector? haha. Maybe I should sell them off and buy some sheet stock. There's a sheet metal suppier across the street from my shop. I was also thinking about using some Euro and Lira that have the two different colors in one coin. I'm wondering also, if nickel and copper etch at different rates. I'd like to make a twist billet and put a long, deep etch into it. I've got a big batch of Copper Chloride that I mixed up for another project. As for the JFKs, circulation doesn't mean much to me. I save them for the junk silver. I coin roll search here and there. I've got a nice collection of War Nickels and a few silver dimes and quarters. Didn't pay a thing for them. I used up all my 40% JFKs making jewelery. haha

I'd really like to give it a twist, I'm nervous though. haha. I have a huge bag of old English pennies, the big ones. I think i'll stack them up with some of the brass sheet scrap I have. I'd like to find a good source of Nickel-Silver, I think it would be a lot less tempermental in the forge than sterling.

Pictures! Here's the dime ingot. Just a wee baby ingot, about 2 inches long. I like the simple, kind of wood grain pattern. I may give a go at twisting it though, since its nice and drawn out. Also scored these from my girlfriend's change jar. Two 1964's, 90% silver. Won't be using them for Mokume though, just for the junk silver coin collection. I've got a stack of 9 copper half dollars that will become a larger version of the baby ingot tomorrow.