Last weekend was another "2nd Saturday" with Deb. I took down my silver dish to solder the base on to it and to work on a piece with curves.
Before we got started, I showed Deb the smashed vessel from the "Put The Hammer Down..." event. We discussed what I was doing and the events that transpired that resulted in me smashing it. I mentioned that I had changed to MY stake which was similar to her Dixion 13 but the dimensions were smaller; and Deb agreed that the stake change cause the shape to change and I would not have "recovered it" unless i was willing to continue and change the vessel to match my stake OR I could have stopped, gotten Deb's stake back and fixed it then. BUT of course this is after the smashing - hind sight is great but NEXT time, you DON'T change stakes mid-stream while working on a curve UNLESS YOU ARE CHANGING direction!
I also discussed how on the new piece, there was still a small bit of stretching occurring and I felt that she should also look at my hammering technique to see what I was not doing right (wrong is such an ugly word).
In Deb's studio, I set up my stake at what I thought was the correct height and place my copper vessel on the stake and proceeded to land a few strikes on the wall of the vessel. Thats all it took for Deb to see what was going on.
First: my stake was positioned a bit to high
Secondly: my blows were not landing the hammer face flat onto the metal.
Together, these two things were resulting in me doing more forging versus compression. You need the compression to bring the walls in but the forging was also pushing material forward from the hammer face, thus stretching the metal ever so slightly. Basically in very simple terms what was (not any more!) happening was the bottom edge of the hammer was hitting the metal and the stake before the majority of the face of the hammer did.
This mid-course correction has made my work easier as I am now getting more compression [that's thickening of the matter] and less stretching. It has also made me work a bit slower but more exact resulting in more symmetry around the diameter as well.
As Hans Solo said to Luke Skywalker, after Luke hit his first target and was whooping it up, while in the Millennium Falcon.. "Don't get cocky kid".
My next post will be about my new fascination with fold forming and the experiments I am doing
Before we got started, I showed Deb the smashed vessel from the "Put The Hammer Down..." event. We discussed what I was doing and the events that transpired that resulted in me smashing it. I mentioned that I had changed to MY stake which was similar to her Dixion 13 but the dimensions were smaller; and Deb agreed that the stake change cause the shape to change and I would not have "recovered it" unless i was willing to continue and change the vessel to match my stake OR I could have stopped, gotten Deb's stake back and fixed it then. BUT of course this is after the smashing - hind sight is great but NEXT time, you DON'T change stakes mid-stream while working on a curve UNLESS YOU ARE CHANGING direction!
I also discussed how on the new piece, there was still a small bit of stretching occurring and I felt that she should also look at my hammering technique to see what I was not doing right (wrong is such an ugly word).
In Deb's studio, I set up my stake at what I thought was the correct height and place my copper vessel on the stake and proceeded to land a few strikes on the wall of the vessel. Thats all it took for Deb to see what was going on.
First: my stake was positioned a bit to high
Secondly: my blows were not landing the hammer face flat onto the metal.
Together, these two things were resulting in me doing more forging versus compression. You need the compression to bring the walls in but the forging was also pushing material forward from the hammer face, thus stretching the metal ever so slightly. Basically in very simple terms what was (not any more!) happening was the bottom edge of the hammer was hitting the metal and the stake before the majority of the face of the hammer did.
This mid-course correction has made my work easier as I am now getting more compression [that's thickening of the matter] and less stretching. It has also made me work a bit slower but more exact resulting in more symmetry around the diameter as well.
As Hans Solo said to Luke Skywalker, after Luke hit his first target and was whooping it up, while in the Millennium Falcon.. "Don't get cocky kid".
My next post will be about my new fascination with fold forming and the experiments I am doing
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