At Last! Back To Lapidary

I haven't been to the Club for more than a few minutes since last April. There were medical reasons, seasonal condensation of hours to times that didn't work well for me, and the emotional drag of having what was supposed to be a major project wind up showing me graphically where the gaps in my skills lay.

This month, I had required attendance as secretary for a couple of meetings, but nothing much else changed. Perhaps it can be considered on the plus side that I was no longer spinning the wheels in my brain, keeping me alert and awake, trying to figure out the next design, the best (perhaps) technique, the special project, instead of falling asleep when I wanted to rather than an hour or two later. But required attendance and winter longer hours got me started up again.

It's starting to feel good. I spent parts of two days with the grinding wheels on various rocks. Unfortunately, every one I chose to work on was either agate or jasper, both very hard, thus a slow slog. Nothing got much closer to completion.

But I was working again. And there was incentive to keep on working with receipt of a check for my share of three items that sold over the summer.

I managed to pop in for the last half of a workshop on a new way to use copper to make a bail which was also big enough to glue on the back of a stone. No more wrecked wire wrapping! In many ways the technique is similar to making bolos, which is where I started out, but hanging from a chain necklace rather than on a braided leather cord.

The slowness of bolo sales meant that I spent most of two years worth of energy in making stones without anything good looking to mount them on to wear. There are a whole pile of polished cabs sitting in a drawer waiting to go.

So today wound up being a long day in the club. I bought a sheet of copper, consulted on a few techniques along the way (one of the best reasons for going to the club, besides all the equipment), cut half the sheet into strips in a couple lengths, and sanded all the sharp edges and corners.

In case you wondered, it's not by using sandpaper, which sounds like an impossible task. Instead, the club saves old grinding wheels which have worn out on the outer circle, but if you lay them flat on the table, you have a big round flat block of surface area to move your metal across. There are a combination of techniques how to best move across that surface to make all the edges and corners smooth without ruining the flat of the copper strip.

Next comes the shaping/punching/fastening the loop part, where the final product becomes an actual bail ready to attach to your stone. Or so I thought. But somebody asked had I thought about decorating the strips, rather than having a plain flat strip which you have to polish smudges, stains and fingerprints off of.

Hmmm, work and work for something plain and flat and showing all its flaws despite your best efforts? Or, the technique I picked from many possible, hammer a design into the copper leaving it already textured and no longer so shiny, so imperfections become merely part of the finished product?

Silly question!

I saw a variety of hammered designs on sample bails and one jumped right out at me. Unfortunately, the person who'd done it, having done a variety of samples, didn't remember just which tools she'd used to produce that particular effect. She did know the technique involved a flat steel hammering surface to lay your metal on, and the technique of how to use the hammer to mark whichever design you wanted,  though not which surface of which tool was the one for this design.

The club only has about 30 hammers and uncounted punches and similar kinds of metal marking equipment. It's good that we have them all. It's just a pain figuring out which to use and how. Take a simple carpentry hammer: you can strike with about 5 or 6 different parts of the head and each will make a different dent. The next hammer offers as many options, slightly different results. And some heads are larger or smaller, some flat, some curved, some have corners, some sides have points or are flat....  There are a variety of wooden ones too, just not for this use.

It can take a while to figure which and how for your desired result. I took a couple small flat copper scrap pieces and tried different things. Not wanting to waste too many, they wound up with several layers of strike-overs. Eventually I figured it out.

Then I had to practice so the strike would both land where I wanted it - fortunately I picked random distribution instead of uniform - and work on holding the hammer head aimed vertically a little further away from me than felt natural, so I could get the right shape in the pattern, shallow oval rather than deep circular.

In addition, there was always the issue of landing on the copper instead of a finger! There is incentive to master that one quickly.

Liking what I'd done with the first strip, I decided to make all of them that way. It was so engrossing that I was still pounding away well after official club closing time. Lucky for me, several others were also there, so I wasn't kicked out, and finished all my strips. I have a zipper bag full of copper strips ready for shaping, punching, fastening both together and to a stone.

Next visit.

I'm back in the groove!