The Making of Luminous Relic #1937

I thought it would be high time to do another photo series, start to finish, documenting the creation of a vessel as these seem to be fairly popular. So here is Luminous Relic #1937 and the processes and stages it went through.

So I guess I’m not starting this series from the very beginning, which for me is a 3 foot by 8 foot sheet of copper. From this large sheet I cut out various sized disks that I will use to form the raised vessels. For this particular vessel I used the 12 inch diameter disk of 18 gauge copper that you see here.

I don’t know if you can see but there is a center kernel, a small dot, hammered into the middle of the disk. I did this initially to draw the circle I was going to cut out. This center kernel is important to me since I keep working around it during the raising process. Using dividers I lightly scribed in a series of rings which will act as guidelines as I hammer. They help me stay more or less symmetrical as I go. These scribed lines are on what will be the outside of the vessel.

Before I start raising though I begin with just a little bit of sinking in order to help get the metal moving in the right direction. For this I made a sinking stump which you can see here. Basically it’s just a stump with a dish like depression carved into it. I’ll be using a round faced hammer which more or less moves the metal equally in all directions with its blows. Also important to note, I have flipped the disk over from the last image. For sinking I will be hammering on what will be the interior of the vessel.

I don’t do a lot of sinking, just a quick once over to crudely dish it out and get the walls moving in the direction I want them to go. I should say, the metal was in a softened state when I began. My rule of thumb is that if I hammer so much when sinking that I need to soften (anneal) the metal before I begin raising then I’ve hammered too much. The sinking process stretches the metal out, making it thinner. This is something I’m not really looking to do.

This image shows the various tools I’ll be using to do the angle raising work. First up is my vise mounted stake. This is one of stakes I originally made from scrap steel when I was graduating from college. The cheapest way to get stakes is generally to make them yourself! That said, the businessman in me says I should probably insert a plug here for the stake sets I make. They are mostly for the occasional raising workshops I teach, but if I have any extra or left over sets I do sell them in this section of my website. More detailed info about these stakes can be found in this other section of my website.

As for the hammers I will be using the middle and heavyweight versions of the Huang Raising Hammer made by Saign Charlestein. If you are interested in purchasing them you can go straight to Saign’s website here. As an added bonus use the discount code DH10 to get 10% off your order with him!

The odd looking green hammer you see in the photo is a prototype of the FrankenHammer designed by Brian Meek many years ago. He sent one to me and told me to “break it” and tell him what was wrong. I did that and he of course made adjustments to fix the issues. What I especially like about it is that it’s a nonmarring hammer, similar to the standard rawhide mallet you see in the photo, but there is more weight in the head so it hits much harder! The faces can be changed out to different materials, or replaced as a face breaks down over time. I do use the FrankenHammer all the time in my raising work, mostly when I’m working up around the edge of the vessel in each course. Brian got pulled away to other ventures, most notably the Knew Concepts saws before he ever quite got these to market. In preparation for this post I asked him where I should send interested people. He told me to direct you to the Knew Concepts website, https://knewconcepts.com/, and said they’d be there “soon”. He has so many irons in the fire you might need to gently poke him through the site if you are interested in a FrankenHammer. It is a pretty cool hammer! I’m glad I have one!

In this photo I have started the first course of raising. I begin in the middle and work my way out in the concentric rings I scribed in earlier. The disk is held against the forming stake. Then I hit it with my hammer just above where it is in contact with the stake. The angle I hold the disk at on the stakes determines the size of the air gap between the piece and the stake where I am hammering. What I am doing is hammering that gap down to the stake, rotating the piece a bit to get it set up for the next section, and hammering that section down to the stake. Repeat over and over until done!

You may notice leather gloves in the photo. I find the hand that holds the vessel works pretty hard and wearing a glove on that hand helps a lot. I also like to sit while raising so that I can use my leg to help support the piece and maintain a consistent angle. This wears holes in jeans pretty fast! The solution to this problem was to use the other leather glove I wasn’t wearing so the edge of the disk rests on it rather than my jeans.

Here is the piece after the first course of raising. At this point the metal is really work hardened from all the the hammering. If I kept hammering on it not only would I not get much movement, but I’d also run the risk of it cracking since it gets more brittle as it gets work hardened. What I need to do is get it back to a softened state again.

To get it soft again I need to anneal it. That is a fancy term for playing with fire! I use a propane/air Goss brand torch for my annealing. If you are interested in more specifics about the torch I like you can find it here.

With copper I need to heat it until it’s glowing a dull red in order to get the temperature I need to soften the metal again.

The process of heating the copper will result in a dirty oxidized surface however. While the metal is soft at this point if I just started hammering on it now what would happen is that all that black oxide would get hammered into a fine powder which I’d be breathing in. Can we say “black boogers”? More importantly, I am now highly allergic to this copper oxide dust. I could wear a respirator while hammering, but the best solution is just to clean the metal before starting to hammer again.

After annealing the disk I first quench it in water to cool it off.

Then to really clean the copper I put it in a mild acid bath we call the “pickle”. Specifically I am using a common swimming pool chemical generally called PH Down. It is actually just sodium bisulfate that I mix into solution with water.

I could quench the hot metal directly into the pickle, but I would rather it be hot water that is spraying up rather than hot acid!

Once it is clean I will rinse it in the water bath.

This annealing process will happen between every course of raising, but I won’t keep showing it in this photo series. Copper is wonderful in that as long as I stop to anneal when it gets work hardened I can keep pushing it over all the place. It’s like very stiff clay.

In this photo you see the piece after it has come out of the pickle. I will again scribe new guide lines with my dividers. I won’t be showing this in the subsequent courses either. One thing I will note here is that as the vessel walls raise up the area in the middle gets done before the edges are. I only scribe lines for the areas I need to work in any particular course.

Here is the piece after the second course of raising.

Here it is after the 3rd course of raising. I forgot to take my photo immediately after finishing the raising course, but remembered after annealing and quenching in water. So this photo is just before it went into the pickle to clean off the oxide layer.

Here is the piece after the 4th course of raising.

Now we are after the 5th course of raising.

This is after the 6th course.

This is after the 7th course. Notice from the location of the fresh hammer marks how I’m no longer working the middle section of the vessel. At this point I’m mostly working to get that outer edge raised up.

Here we are after the 8th course. The outer edge is finally starting to come in now.

This is after the 9th course of raising. The courses go quicker as I progress since I’m hammering less and less surface area. Now I’m focused on just getting that edge to turn inward more.

Here’s the 10th course.

This is the 11th and final course of basic raising for this piece. I find most of my vessels take between 8 to 14 courses to go from flat disk to basic form.

Right now the form itself is a bit lumpy here and there. I will need to do a planishing course where I work to iron all these lumps out and clean it up into the final form.

For the planishing stage I generally use the same stake or stakes I formed the vessel over as these should be able to match the curves reasonably well. The ideal planishing stake is one that matches the curves of a broad area perfectly. This would make it much easier to hold the vessel in position while planishing.

I am using a different hammer though. This is my most used planishing hammer. It’s one made by Peddinghaus that I bought many years ago. One face is flat and the other is slightly curved. I tend to use the slightly curved face most often, this vessel being no different.

In this photo you see the vessel as it’s partway through the planishing course. I find this course takes much longer to do than any of the raising courses. I need to be more exacting since I am now working to develop the final overall form of the vessel. Unlike the raising courses where I was aiming to hammer on an air gap, with planishing I am looking to hammer right where the stake is in contact with the copper. This lets me pack it down and smooth it out. There will be small air gaps though where there are lumps or bumps that need to be worked out. On this vessel it looks like I ended up more dramatically reforming the shape of the vessel than usual as I moved toward the edge.

This is a photo of the vessel after the planishing course. I now have a smoother, more consistent surface and form to develop further with my chasing design work.

I should also note that right now the vessel is uniformly work hardened since I hammered over the entire surface while planishing.

Although I am working on a different vessel, if you wanted to see a video showing some of these raising processes I do have one in this area of my website.

At some point before I solder on a silver rim I need to clean up the irregular edge I have after all the raising work. I’ve found this is best to do while the vessel is in a work hardened state. While the chasing work will end up causing more distortions of the edge it has been worthwhile for me to grind off most of the irregularities now, before I begin chasing. That way I just need to do a little grinding after when the metal will end up being in an annealed state.

The quickest way I’ve found to clean up this rim edge is to hold it firmly down on a belt sander. This is probably my least favorite part of the entire process of creating my work. The belt sander is kind of scary!

In this photo you can see the rim edge after I have ground it down on the belt sander. The edge still has some ragged bits.

Here is a close up of that sanded rim edge. As you can see there are lots of burs and fins that need to be removed yet.

To remove these burrs and fins I use a 1/2 inch 1/2 round file. It does the job pretty quickly.

I now have a nicely formed vessel that is ready to move onto the chasing stage. However, it is also very work hardened.

I need the vessel nicely annealed before I fill it with wax in preparation for chasing. So it gets another bath in the fire of the Goss torch until glowing dull red. Then I have the oxide layer to deal with.

It gets a quick quench in the water bath to cool off.

Next is the pickle, where the acid bath will clean off all the oxides bringing back to fresh clean copper, which will also be nice and soft from the annealing.

Traditionally metalsmiths would fill their vessels with pitch for chasing. I much prefer using a microcrystalline bronze sculpting wax instead of pitch. I find it much easier and cleaner to work with when chasing vessels. Since people often ask, I’ll tell you that specifically what I like is 2-AB56 Medium Brown Molding Wax made by J.F. McCaughin company. For years now I’ve been getting mine from Arizona Sculpture Supply. Here is a link to the page on their website with it: https://arizonasculpture.com/j-mac-art-bronze-wax/

Other microcrystalline sculpting waxes have worked fine but this is my preferred one since it seems to have a good balance of firmness offering support, but still some give. Perhaps more importantly, I’ve found this particular wax doesn’t seem to pull away from the edge of the vessel as it cools and shrinks. Some types do, which would require an extra step to refill that edge gap.

Anyway, to fill my vessel I begin just shoving in as many pieces as can fit without going over.

To finish filling the vessel I get it propped upright so that the rim is pretty level. (I will only be able to fill it to the lowest point of the rim!) Using my annealing torch, but turned way down for this operation, I then begin melting the wax chunks, carefully adding more pieces as needed to fill it up to the top.

My goal with this is to get it completely filled, hopefully without too much spilling over the side. I’m not actually concerned with getting all the wax chunks completely melted. In this photo you can see some bits that are clearly not liquid. This is just fine.

Unfortunately it seems I didn’t take a photo of the piece after the wax cooled so you could see the inside. What happens is that the wax will shrink as it cools. The 2-AB56 generally sinks down in the middle, creating what is sometimes a pretty deep depression down into the vessel. As long as it’s not right up next to the side this isn’t a problem. It will still provide all the internal support I’ll need when chasing.

While there are certainly artistic decisions made in the raising process as I develop the overall form of the piece, I feel like the most challenging artistic work happens with the chasing. For Luminous Relic #1937 the chased design was developed in stages. I didn’t know what the final look would be when I began.

To start with I did a simpler layer of design utilizing a technique I call hammer chasing. I find my approach to hammer chasing is best suited to large forms and long peaked ridge lines. I plotted these out using a .5mm mechanical pencil. I like the mechanical pencil for the level of precision it offers. When I’m designing I find it can matter to the overall visual flow whether a line is .5mm to one side or another.

Here is another photo of the initial design work for the hammer chased layer. I always draw straight on the vessel itself so I can really see how the lines move and flow around the piece. I wouldn’t have a good sense of this if I tried designing it flat on paper first.

The downside to using the mechanical pencil is that the graphite line would end up getting rubbed away long before I had it chased in. I need a way to fix the lines once I’ve determined their positions in pencil. To do this I have made a tool I call my micro-burnisher. It’s really a drafting supply tool called a clutch. You push in the end and 3 “jaws” open up out of the top. It generally holds some sort of pencil lead. I took that lead out and replaced it with a small piece of steel where I have worked the end to a point that is sharpish, but also polished. It works similar to an etching needle except I’m not really scratching down into the surface of the copper when I go over my pencil lines with it. Rather it is more like it is polishing in the lines on the surface.

The result is a fine line I can still (barely) see after the pencil gets rubbed off. Often I will go back over these burnished lines with the pencil again just before I start chasing in an area so I can see the line better.

With my approach to hammer chasing I tend to make raised ridge lines. To do this I will crudely hammer down the metal 1/4 inch or so away from the lines. I love having the full set of Huang Raising Hammers for this work since they give me a good range of rounded cross peen heads to select from when trying to fit between the closer spaced lines.

This initial hammering is pretty heavy and forceful so I like to have some thicker padding underneath the vessel to help avoid work hardening the bottom while I hammer on the top area. Often I use an old leather apron folded up to make a leather pad.

Once the crude work away from my lines is done the precise hammering happens to refine the form right up to the lines, creating my raised ridges.

For years I used the Fretz #9 hammer which you see in this photo (the reddish handled one in the back) to do this precise hammering. It works. The cross peen face helps to develop the long smooth lines. The downside is that it’s a bit lightweight for the job, so it takes a lot more hammering to get there.

More recently Saign Charlestein, after the success of the Huang Raising Hammer, asked if there was another hammer I might like to develop with him. I didn’t have to think too hard about that. The result is the Huang Embossing Hammers. These are purpose designed for the sort of hammer chasing I do, having that cross peen face good for precision long lines, but also with much more weight in the head so it moves the metal easier and quicker with significantly fewer hammer blows needed. They are designed so one version has a flatter face for convex surfaces and another has a rounded face for concave surfaces. If you are interested in these here is a direct link to Saign’s website: https://www.metalsmithing-tools.com/product-page/huang-embossing-hammer. The DH10 discount code will get you 10% off these hammers as well.

Unfortunately I can still only hammer so much on the surface before the copper gets work hardened. Even more unfortunately I can’t anneal the metal without first removing the inner wax.

I’ve used various contraptions over the years to do this. The most important point, and let me emphasize this is a VERY IMPORTANT POINT, is that I need to get the vessel propped upside down so I can gently heat from below allowing the molten wax a clear escape route the entire time! I will only point my torch at the exposed wax! I WILL NOT directly heat the vessel itself! If I just started heating the vessel directly the wax inside could get molten and expand. That expansion would build up pressure without any way for the pressure to release, until eventually it becomes so great it does release in a quick, very violent way! In other words if you are directly heating the vessel rather than just the exposed wax you are making a bomb which you will also be standing right next to when it explodes!

The contraption you see in this photo seems to work quite well. I can turn the screws in or out to adjust it for various sized vessels. I heat slowly and gently underneath with my annealing torch turned down. The molten wax drips down into the shallow tray beneath where it is collected. Once enough builds up in the tray I will flip it over and hammer on the back to knock it out. I can then break up the wax more and keep reusing it. A tip for breaking up the wax, it goes much easier when cold!

Generally when melting the wax out of a vessel there is a larger plug of wax that eventually drops out. This is what my chicken wire “net” is for. It can catch the plug before it splashes into the puddle of molten wax. Clearly from the state of the walls of my torch work cabinet I had many wax splashes before I thought to add a net to catch the plug.

The wax melts out fairly clean, but there is still a film remaining on the vessel that needs to be cleaned up. Since I need to anneal the piece and the wax is flammable I just go at it with my annealing torch, burning off the wax film and annealing at the same time.

Here is the piece after annealing and burning the wax film. From here I quench in water then pickle it to bring it back to clean copper.

Now that it’s annealed I need to refill with the wax. I shove in as many chunks as I can, starting with that big plug that dropped out when I melted the wax out previously. I have a pile of various sized chunks ready sitting next to the piece as I melt it all down in. The pile to melt in tends to need to be bigger than you would imagine.

Here is the piece refilled with molten wax. I need to now let it sit and cool.

I wasn’t happy with the depth level I achieved in that first course of hammer chasing so I did it all a second time, starting with the heavier hammers and finishing up with these smaller hammers.

From the state you see here I also had to repeat the melting out of the wax, annealing, and refilling with wax in order to get the piece ready for the next layer of design.

This second layer of design was much more complicated than the initial laying out of the lines to be hammer chased. Here I am working off the ridges and forms that hammer chasing created. All these new lines are planned for what I think of as regular chasing work. When I’m doing normal chasing I tend to think of the lines I draw as being an intersection of two planes, or levels. One side of the line will be higher and the other lower.

When designing for this more complex normal chasing work I will often spend many hours, exploring options, and carefully working out how the lines, shapes, and proportions fit together. The .5mm mechanical pencil and a kneaded rubber eraser are my tools. I like the kneaded rubber eraser because I can work it into fine points to get into and erase just tiny areas.

Here is a second view of the design work on Luminous Relic #1937.

One more view of the design work. Often times getting 80 to 90 percent of the design worked out is fairly quick. It’s getting those last sections to come back together so it all flows that is the real challenge. This can be a complex puzzle to solve without a clear “correct” solution. The question is often, “can I make it better or do I stop here?”

I feel like designing is a very important step. Getting a good design is so critical to me. It doesn’t matter how much skill I have with the chasing techniques, if my initial design sucks then the final piece will suck!

As before, once I have the lines worked out in pencil I fix them in place with my micro burnisher.

Now I begin the normal chasing work. I find this is the most time consuming stage of the whole process.

Initially I start by establishing all my lines. To do this I use my special liners. I mentioned before that when I draw a line I think of one side being higher and the other lower. My special liners help me do this more quickly as they establish the line and begin the process of pushing one side down.

Again the business guy in me says I should make a plug for my chasing tools here. As with the raising stakes I mostly make my very basic 15 piece chasing tool sets for the few workshops I teach. Generally I do make a few extra sets and these along with whatever I might have left over from classes are put up for sale on my website in this section. I use way more than these 15 tools in my work, but I designed this set to be minimal yet still allow a wide range of work to be done.

Once the initial lines are established I go back with a range of tools to do what I call “pushing the planes”. This is where I push back broad areas, sculpting the surface so it appears that the shapes and forms move over and under each other.

The tool I use the most is definitely my large square flatter. In this photo it is the one with the rubber tape wrapped around the shaft of the tool. I will wrap some of my tools with this tape to provide a bigger area to grip, esp. if it is a tool I use for many hours on end.

I should probably tell you what sort of tape this is since it is kind of weird and can be hard to find. Broadly speaking it is a silicone self fusing tape. I like it for this application since it doesn’t seem to break down into a nasty rubber goo like most rubber tapes do over time. In fact I’ve been using this silicone tape over the top of rubber tapes that have started to break down. With some searching I can usually find it at the big box home improvement stores in the plumbing section. (One use for the tape is to seal small leaks in PVC plumbing.) I now keep a supply at home that I got from Amazon. Here is a link to this sort of tape on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AenOvm (Full disclosure, I am an Amazon associate and this is an affiliate link. I may earn a small commission if you use it.)

Here is the vessel after I have finished the entire first round of normal chasing. I realize now that I’m seeing all the images together that this looks essentially the same as the previous photo. Sorry about that.

At this point I again melted the wax out, annealed it, pickled, and refilled the vessel with wax.

For the next course of chasing I am going to essentially repeat what I did before. My goal is to push everything deeper and make things more crisply defined. So I begin with my special liner tools. This second time around it goes quicker since I have a channel from the previous course to run the tools in.

After the lining work I grab this array of tools to push the planes back.

Here’s another view of the progress on this piece with the flatter tools to push the planes.

I’m now moving into my final layer of design for this piece. Once again I have melted the wax out, annealed, pickled, and refilled it with wax. I had no idea what sort of pattern I would do in the large recessed areas when I began. I just knew I would do something. Now I’m working it out in pencil, starting with “seed” circles and developing this flowerlike form from it.

I kept “growing” these flower like forms from the seed circles, letting them overlap a bit to create a greater sense of depth.

Do I really want to do this? That’s going to be a lot of very fussy chasing work with tons of corners to crisp up!

Yup. It seems I am going to do it. Here I set in the pencil lines with my micro burnisher.

As with prior courses I begin with the lining work. In this case because these are such small detailed sections I need to also grab my smaller versions of my special liner tools.

Next it is on to pushing the planes back, sculpting the flowers out. As with the lining work I had to break out some smaller flatter tools and spend more time working with them than I normally do. It doesn’t necessarily show in this photo but the corners are all a bit fuzzy, asking to be cleaned up.

In order to clean up those corners I’ve got to get out an even larger array of corner tucking tools to crisp things up.

Here is a image of Luminous Relic #1937 after I’ve finished this stage of chasing work. I’m quite happy with the forms and volumes that have been developed.

Here is one more angle of the piece at this stage.

There is just one final course of chasing work left to do. That is the texturing course. Oftentimes this ends up being the most time consuming of all of them! I am using these very tiny tools to make the patterns and textures you see here.

Unlike prior courses of chasing work though I did not need to melt out the wax and reanneal the piece. I find texturing tends to go better on the work hardened surface of the previous round of chasing. Because the tools are so small they tend to cut in easily and the hardened metal seems to give the right level of support to work against.

Here is an image of the vessel after the texturing course. At this point the chasing work is essentially done.

Here is one more angle of Luminous Relic #1937 at this stage in it’s creation. This is the point I oftentimes look at the work and marvel that it began as a simple flat sheet of copper. Thousands upon thousands of hammer blows have made a series of tiny bends to carefully shape it to what you see. Metal is such an amazing material!

Now that the chasing work is finished I need to melt the wax out one last time.

Once the plug of wax drops out into the chicken wire net I pull the vessel off to the side. After the wax plug has cooled enough to touch I try to pick it out of the wire net before the wax fully cools and more securely binds it to the chicken wire.

The wax tray is moved aside and I anneal the vessel again, burning off the wax residue at the same time. I don’t actually need the vessel annealed, so I could use paint thinner or some similar solvent to remove the wax residue, allowing me to keep the metal work hardened. However, I will be soldering on a silver wire rim next. This process will get the piece up to annealing temperatures anyway so there really isn’t any point in going to the extra trouble. Thus I just burn the wax off now and let it anneal.

I did first quench it in water, before moving the piece to the pickle to clean off the oxidation. Note, the pickle solution you see in this photo is fairly fresh, recently mixed up. As it gets used more it develops the blue color you saw in prior photos. The blue is copper oxides dissolved in the acid.

I noted previously that the rim would still need some clean up after the chasing work was done. Here you can see it’s a bit out of round, with a couple of indentations where chased lines went right off the edge.

To true this up round again I take it back to a large stake and using my rawhide mallet gently hammer around the very edge, tweaking it as needed back into shape.

Here it is rounded out again. You may not notice much difference. Sometimes it can be subtle. To test if it is round enough to solder the rim on I will use the ruler to measure the diameter across the opening. Then I check to see that this measurement is the same if I measure across from multiple directions all around.

I might have gotten it round in the last photo, but it wasn’t fully flat. So to flatten it again I take it back to the belt sander. Thankfully I don’t need to do much work on the sander at this point since I ground most of the excess off the rim when it was work hardened just after the planishing stage. It was also far less detailed and prone to damage in case I lost my grip on the piece while sanding!

This photo doesn’t show it well, but the belt sander does leave a lot of burrs around the edge as it did before. So I got out the 1/2 inch 1/2 round file again to remove them.

Here is the rim all cleaned up, rounded out, and deburred. I double checked with the ruler to make sure I didn’t pull it out of round with the force of the belt sander on the annealed metal.

Now it’s time to make the silver wire rim. I like to use fine silver round wire, because the pure silver is nice and soft as well as being less prone to tarnish as compared to a sterling silver alloy.

On most of my vessels I use a round tapered bracelet mandrel to form my rings around. Luminous Relic #1937 is larger than normal, thus needing a much larger ring. Fortunately I have a beautiful blacksmithing cone designed to form rings up to 13 inches in diameter. I’m also using a thicker gauge of wire than normal in order to have the visual proportions look right. This rim will be made from 6 gauge wire.

First I just bend it around the forming cone to get things generally round.

After it is generally round with curves that are close to what is needed I will hold it up to the vessel itself and mark where to cut it. I’m pushing the limits of what these flush cutters can handle, but with some effort I can manage to cut the soft 6 gauge fine silver round wire.

In this photo you also see a bunch of other vessels in the background. Generally speaking I do things in groups. Making and soldering on rims is one such operation. I just save up pieces until I’m ready to finish a bunch.

While the flush cutters cut a fairly clean edge they aren’t perfect. Soldering goes much easier if there are no gaps at all. To help make a cleaner, gap free joint I will hold the two ends of the ring firmly together and using a jewelers saw, cut down the joint line. This essentially “files” both sides at the same time to get them to meet up cleanly.

I can’t believe I forgot to photograph this, but the next step would have been soldering the two sides together to form the ring. At that point it is the right size, but not necessarily round or flat. So I put the ring back on the tapered cone and using the rawhide mallet carefully tap it into true round.

Now it’s true round, but it might not be dead flat. So I bring it to my steel bench block and using the rawhide mallet again will carefully hammer it flat.

In order to flatten it more in an effort to get the best fit possible I then sand the ring on a sheet of abrasive paper taped down to a flat board. This makes a small flat area on the ring which will be the side sitting on the flat rim of the copper vessel when I go to solder them together.

Soldering on a rim can be messy. It’s especially difficult with large vessels such as Luminous Relic #1937. What I really don’t want to have happen is for excess solder to flow into the chased details.

Solder doesn’t like to flow on dirty metal. I can take advantage of this tendency and deliberately make my detailed areas in the potential zone of flow dirty. I’ve used various things for this over the years. These days I find I prefer Ronda Coryell’s Masking Mud. It’s a nice non-toxic substance designed just for this sort of thing.

You no doubt noticed the copper oxidizing to black whenever I heated it in the annealing process. I need a way to keep the metal clean while I heat it up to soldering temperature. For this I use a paste flux. It absorbs excess oxygen as I heat the piece. However, it has it’s limits so I want to heat things up quickly and get the soldering done before the flux is exhausted. This is especially hard with these larger vessels which need more heat in general. I’m also forced to solder with my big, but dirty, annealing torch instead of my more precise, cleaner jewelers torch.

I use wire solder for soldering my rims. Usually I just work straight off my spool of it. I find I often have to get my fingers in too close to where the heat burns them on a piece this size. It seems to help to have a bunch of sections of wire solder mounted in cross lock tweezers. I can feed them in steadier and closer without burning my fingers this way. So that’s what you are seeing off to the side in this photo.

When soldering you need to get both pieces of metal up to temperature at the same time. This is especially hard with the large mass of metal in the vessel being soldered to the small mass in the silver rim. I need to start out just pumping heat into the base of the vessel, keeping the torch away from the rim area. Only when it is almost at temp will I move the torch to the rim.

If things go well then I can feed in the wire solder and get it to flow. Solder flows to the hottest point, so in theory I can draw the line of solder around with the torch. On these large vessels it rarely goes so nice. I struggle to get it in and flowing cleanly without burning my fingers. This photo shows what things looked like after the first attempt at soldering.

For a piece this size things actually went fairly well on the first try. There is this one little section that didn’t flow though. It got too dirty before I could get around to it. So I need to clean it all up again and repeat the whole process.

The second soldering attempt went easier since I just needed to focus on the one spot. I was able to get it on the second try.

After soldering these larger pieces like Luminous Relic #1937 there is often a lot of mess to clean up. I begin the clean up with files to remove the excess solder from the silver rim.

Next I use my flex shaft tool with a sandpaper disk to strip off all the excess solder on the copper parts.

In this case the sandpaper disk took off so much metal that it significantly changed the visual texture of the copper edge. So I took my large square flatter and very carefully chased over air to put the texture back in without distorting the shape of the vessel.

Patinas like to have a bit of tooth to the metal so I next used a sanding sponge to work over the whole surface.

I also want the piece to be clean for the patina application. So I put the vessel back into the pickle, taking it out just before I’m ready to do the patina.

Liver of sulfur is probably my favorite patina for chased pieces. It works so well to highlight the dimensions and textures. I mix it up in hot water, rinse the vessel under hot water to warm it some, and apply multiple coats. I like to get it dark overall, sand it off the surface to bring out highlights, then do a quick light coat to tone back the bare metal.

Here is the vessel after the patina but before I waxed it.

With a liver of sulfur patina I usually use a hot wax finish. This is where I heat the metal up so when I apply the paste wax it melts right in, usually smoking just a bit. I feel like the hot wax finish is a bit more durable than applying the wax cold at room temperatures. Many patinas look diferent with a hot wax and cold wax finish. With liver of sulfur they look the same so I go with hot wax.

Using a low tack drafting tape I mask off the silver rim so the patina finish will be protected while I polish up the silver.

First I strip off the patina from the silver with the 1 inch white radial bristle brushes made by 3M. Then I use the Blue EVE rubberized polishing wheels to smooth out the rim more.

I do the rest of my silver polishing by hand. I start with 3M’s 60 micron finishing film, then move on to their sanding sponges going through the fine, super fine, micro fine, and ultra fine grades. (or is it ultra fine then micro fine? I can never remember and so try to just keep them in order.) To finish it out I use Micro Mesh’s abrasives, going with the last 3 grades, 6000 grit, 8000 grit, and 12000 grit. This gives me my final polished finish. Then the drafting tape is carefully removed.

The final stage of the whole process is applying the gold leaf. For this I use a slow set oil based sizing. I paint on a thin coat and let it dry to the proper tack, which is just barely sticky. The slow set sizing can take 12 to 24 hours to dry to the proper tack, but what is nice about it is that once at the working tack it will stay there for another 12 hours.

Finally the magic is laid in, sheets of 23-karat gold leaf. I use surface gold leaf, sometimes also called loose gold leaf. Using a soft brush I will move the sheets into the vessel, gently tap it down in place, then work to smooth it all down. It will crack and split all over the place, especially on chased surfaces. However where it folds over on itself it will also easily brush away into dust and small bits. I can use this dust and small bits to fill in the cracks and spaces. It’s a slow and meticulous process because the leaf is so incredibly thin and fine. The end result is spectacular though!

Here is the finished work, Lumious Relic #1937. I hope you have enjoyed this photographic documentation of the processes involved in creating it.