Posts tagged as:

hammer

It’s Hammer’n Time!!

by Laurie Jane Kern on November 9, 2009

My backordered hammers arrived on Friday so I decided that Sunday would be the time to play and whale away on some copper.

So after cutting out a 4″ disc of 18g copper; my 5 hammers, the forming stakes, copper disc and I headed off to the garage at 11:00 am [Elisa says this sounds like the intro to a Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected story...]

Here are the hammers and copper on the sandbag in the garage.

I also had a small 2″ disc with me which I decided would be another small bowl with a rim, similar to the one I made at Deb’s 3 weeks ago.

After annealing, I then proceeded to start sinking and making quite a bit of noise - What Fun!  I don’t have all the forming stakes I would like, so I used the punches from the dapping block to assist in making the small bowl. To get me at the correct height, I have to stand on a large block of wood that is left over from our patio cover! [Don't laugh! but it works, and yes this is what the Aspiring Silversmith looks like with bed-head hair.]

This next picture is of the original bowl and the new one without the rim - yet. Also notice the start of a patina on the original bowl.

To make the large bowl, I used my mushroom stake - the curve on this is rather shallow but I think the bowl ended up with a really nice shape. Deb said that I hammered too close to the edge, which is true but the disc did not have a clean edge to begin with and I now think it looks like the edge on a burl-wood bowl

And finally, the two finished bowls at about 4:00 PM.  The large bowl ended up approximately 3.5″ in diameter and a tad over 1.5″ heigh

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A Handful of Hammers

by Laurie Jane Kern on November 1, 2009

If its a gaggle of geese, a herd of cows, a pod of porpoises; what would a handful of hammers be??

My Hammers have finally arrived.

After my class with Deb (read the post Spoon-erism’s) I asked about an initial set of hammers to purchase and Deb sent back a list of 5 hammers: 1 planishing;  1 raising; and 3 sinking/forming hammers in a large, medium and small size.  I have put links to all 5 at the bottom of the post if you are interested.

I did some checking around on the web and Rio (where the links point to) really did have the best prices so I decided to bite the bullet and get them all at once. Then I thought that since Mary was in the class too; that she might want some hammers as well and this way we could get a quantity break (yes, there was quantity break when you bought TWO) and also save on shipping.

It took several days of emails back and forth to finalize what we both wanted as we also went for 2 of the large sandbags as these are useful for sinking. Unfortunately several of the hammers were on backorder. Two of the three hammers plus the sandbags arrived last weekend but the smaller sinking hammers were the ones on backorder.

And the remaining hammers arrived yesterday - I can now start whaling on some metal. And this leads me to the next part - projects. I will take some more classes with Deb, that is a given. But to give me practice in between those sessions I have bought the book “The Craft of Silversmithing” by Alex Austin.  The projects in the book work you through forging to sinking and raising.   I will be doing many of the projects in copper the first time for practice. This is so when I really mess up with odd placed ding’s or scratches I don’t have to worry about it.

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For a list of collective nouns look here:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Transwiki:List_of_collective_nouns_by_subject

For the hammers from Rio look here:

this is the raising hammer that is the largest one:

http://www.riogrande.com/MemberArea/ProductPage.aspx?assetname=112424&page=GRID&free_text%7c1255305206251=hammers&first_answer=46

this is the forming hammer that is the largest one:

http://www.riogrande.com/MemberArea/ProductPage.aspx?assetname=112408&page=GRID&free_text%7c1255305206251=hammers&first_answer=61

this is the forming hammer that is the medium size :

http://www.riogrande.com/MemberArea/ProductPage.aspx?assetname=112405&page=GRID&free_text%7c1255305206251=hammers&first_answer=76

this is the smallest sinking (forming) hammer:

http://www.riogrande.com/MemberArea/ProductPage.aspx?assetname=112399&page=GRID&free_text%7c1255305562251=forming+hammer

this is the planishing hammer :

http://www.riogrande.com/MemberArea/ProductPage.aspx?assetname=112402&page=GRID&free_text%7c1255305206251=hammers&first_answer=76

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Spoon-erism’s

by Laurie Jane Kern on October 11, 2009

Spoonerisms: The terms applied to making a spoon. That’s my definition!

After much searching and talking to a lot of people, I found someone to teach me metal smithing - real metal smithing where you are hammering and moving metal!!

Mary N, who is also a member of the Palomar Gem & Mineral Club told me to contact Deb Jemmott. Mary was taking a class from her at San Diego Community College. [Mary was in my Viking Knit class at the time] - So after a few emails and quite a bit of telephone tag, not only had I spoken to Deb but we set up an all day session. Deb also sent out a call for other students, and Mary signed up too. So, yesterday we had our class, focusing on forming, forging and sinking!

OH MY GOD, IT WAS SO MUCH FUN! We arrived at 10 am and for the next 6 hours we learned how to properly select the working height, hold the hammer and then we proceeded to hammer on aluminum (as it never work hardens thus no annealing required) and Copper. We formed, dapped, annealed, Bouged, planished, and sunk metal using cross pein hammers, sinking hammers, and planishing hammers.

I was able to make a tiny - I mean small bowl with a rim and from an oval blank as spoon bowl (pictures below). Mary worked on a bowl and then started a ‘oak’ leaf bowl/dish [Mary let me know if I got it correct] which I think she is going to continue in the class at the community college.

After our session, I met the Janda, the Fair Maiden of Tran at our favorite Thai restaurant in San Marcos as it was only anther 10 minute drive from Deb’s house. We had yummy Crab Cake Panang for dinner and caught up on lots of gossip. I was home by 7:30 pm and then had to tell everything to my husband.

It was off to bet at midnight, tired and very happy.

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