Hinging the Box

After a lot of psyching myself up, I took a deep breath, sent up a prayer to the god of soldering and started working on the hinge for the new copper box.....

This photograph shows one of the knuckles held in place with a small pallion of solder on top of it ready for soldering. The photo below shows this repeated along the length of one side of the hinge;

The following photo shows the other side of the hinge after soldering;

Now, with both sides soldered, the moment of truth...will they fit together? Well, here's the finished product...What do you think?

  

So...now I can start work on tidying it up and then, on to the insides...

A New Copper Box

I'm returning to box making and have decided to make one from copper domes.

The domes are made from flat discs of copper, annealed and then hammered into a former to create the dome. filing the edges gives each dome a flat edge to allow both halves of the box to come together.

The following picture shows both halves put together to show the outline of the box. It's about 7cm across so it's just the right size to fit in the palm of the hand.

With the domes formed, I've been working on the inside. The first stage is to mae a plate to fit in the bottom half of the box. this is where the box contents will be stored.

Easter Silver 2

This post shows the completed piece I started over Easter. In the last post, I described the problems with the enameling which had left a few bare patches on the inside of the silver bowl. To fix this I used a fine brush to place some more enamel on the patches and then re-fired the silver bowl.

I then added a copper top plate to complete the piece which now looks like this;

 

 And finally, a picture with its 'Big Brother' to give a bit of an idea of scale...

Easter Silver

Here's my most recent enameling experiment. I made a small silver bowl and put a small ring around the top which I plan to use to fit a copper lid to. The enamel is a little blotchy in places, I suspect this is due to a couple of spots of grease I failed to remove before firing.

Piece in a Day No. 2

I got up this morning and thought I'd have another go at...A Piece in A Day... and this is the result;

A small copper bowl made from two pieces of copper plate, one domed and then soldered to the second.

I then put some enamel powder in to the bowl....and the following is the fired result;

Enamel Testing pt2

Following on from my last post, I've been playing around with some enamel to see if I can add a bit more depth to the silver pendant. Here's the result...

 

I'm not sure about the colours , but I'm becoming more satisfied with the finish.

Enamel Testing....Sort-Of

Here's the piece I've made to try out some enameling. I've being trying to create transparent enamel in the spaces between the wires, but its proving difficult to get a complete sheet without holes. So I decided to put a silver plate in to support the enamel. This is the piece prior to enameling. I'd hoped to have a picture of the enameled piece, but have hit a couple of snags, hopefully I'll have a picture tomorrow...