Oak leaves

[jason0012]

I have, for years had a number of products that used oak leaves. My old procedure for creating them was to flame cut from plate. Oxy fuel cutting left lots of slag, and despite changing tips, torches, gas, coatings on material, travel speed and mixture, always led to lots of grinding. Lots of grinding. I want a better way. Now I have a plasma cutter and soon hope to have it up and running, but have been working on an alternative. I thought this tooling might interest some of you. The base material for the leaf ( forged from solid) is 3/4 inch round. It took some experimenting to get a preform that worked ok. The space between the lobes, and root diameter have a big impact on the result. I think on a small power hammer, or treadle hammer it would probably be easiest to use a spring fuller to form each segment separately. If the segments are too deep, material wont flow right. If they arent deep enough they wont form proper lobes. When flattening, it helps to draw long ways to around 5/16 thick, before spreading sideways. I found that the shape created was not 100% what I wanted. They still required grinding to profile, so i made a notcher. The notcher is based on one Clifton Ralph demod . The notcher actually worked pretty well. The grinding required now is minor shaping of the points and knocking down burrs. 

[Glenn]

Plasma could speed things up a bit by cutting out the design from metal flattened out or flat stock the right thickness and then welded to a stem stock.  Then you can make a pattern to form the veins etc.

[Dax Hewitt]

Saturdays plan was making a couple of oak leaf hooks cutting templates with my new plasma cutter, unfortunately work has raised its head so that's not going to happen now