[CRAFT] Art in Metal

[Mhera]

Nice! How did you do it?

[Luftwaffles]

Cool job man. What are you going to do with that? (Sorry if the question is way too stupid, I know nothing about blacksmithing).

[The Skarzs]

. . . Okay, odd. It didn't show that I had any new replies until I clicked on this from "Who's Online".

Cool job man. What are you going to do with that? (Sorry if the question is way too stupid, I know nothing about blacksmithing).

What am I going to do with it? I don't know; first I'll show the little nuggets to my friends before I melt them down again so I can make more, but eventually I'm hoping to make a decent-sized ingot of the stuff.

Nice! How did you do it?

Well, I bought a crucible from Ebay to use, and I stuck it in my coal forge to heat it up. Then I got some copper melted. (One of the most interesting things to see, watching that stuff go from solid to liquid.) I think what I may do next time is let the copper cool a bit before adding the tin, because I may have burned up a bit when I threw it into the molten copper. (Copper and tin have a melting point ratio of about 4:1, meaning I can literally burn tin up into smoke when copper isn't halfway melted.) Thankfully the two can alloy themselves, so not all of it was lost.
Then I began adding some scrap bronze and brass into the mix before pouring it into a poor excuse for a form. Hopefully next time I'll be better prepared.

[Luftwaffles]

And then you can sell the ingot? Cool!

[The Skarzs]

No, I'll use it for projects.

[Faiyloe]

What would you use it for?

[The Skarzs]

I'd use some on knife guards, perhaps some on other little artistic things like leaves, but other than that I don't really know, partly because of my lack of experience with bronze and my continued path into artistic things.

[Faiyloe]

It's all cool. I love embellishment.

[The Skarzs]

Excellent.

[The Skarzs]

Another knife here.

This one was a bribe for someone. I went to a shop that my brother goes to volunteering, and one of the owners said I could use their welding machine and scraps to make my gas forge. One of the other owners wouldn't leave me alone about not helping with the shop project (my brother says he was joking around), but I told him that I would make him a knife if he would get off my back. Three months later it's finally done.

[Mhera]

That looks great. What are the spots on the blade?

[The Skarzs]

Made it out of a useless piece of a farrier's rasp.

The other side has those file lines.

[Mhera]

Oh, cool. How did you make the blade from the rasp? Did you sand it down or something?

[The Skarzs]

No, see, I found a piece about six inches long that someone had already tried to forge, knocking down the teeth and flattening out one end like a spoon. Had to press that wide end down to make the tip, and just left the teeth as they were. The hammering took out most of the visible marks, and everything else came out with sanding. So I did sand it, as you said, but most of the work was by forging.

[Faiyloe]

Oh that is cool! I am sure people have asked you this before but I am lazy. How long does it take you to make one piece?