My new hobby

Hi everyone!

So, here are some pics of the pieces I have made so far, which is a ring and two cufflinks. They are for Adam, (not the ring!) they are bottletops engraved with his nickname, Chico. I am very proud of them, you would not believe what went into making them!! So i am going to tell you:

I cut two discs out of a sheet of silver and tried bashing them with a hammer. It didn't work. So, then I annealed them (heated them up with a blow torch until the copper in them comes to the surface) which makes them more malleable. Then I bashed them some more with a hammer and still got nowhere. I repeated this once more and still got nowhere. I sat down and pouted and then asked the teacher :o) She suggested a sandbag... you put it on a sandbag, put a round solid metal bar thing in the middle and bash it with a big hammer to get the edges to curl around it but that didn't work either so she said we need to use the 'pitch pot'. It is, quite literally, a pot of pitch tar such as you might see on a road surface. You heat it up with the blow torch, wait for it to cool a little but so it's still malleable, then vaseline the underside of the disc, stick it in the pot and bash it as with the sandbag. This time it did work, although it took several goes and lots of bashing and more annealing and several heating-ups of the pitch.

After that I clamped a metal bar and stuck them on the top and bashed the edges down with a hammer, which did work as they had been bent already. Then I used some pliers of various different sizes and kind of twisted and crimped the edges. Plus more bashing and more annealing, It was quite a long process. Then I engraved the top, stuck them in an acid bath, and then soldered on the cufflinks at the back. Then more acid and about 1.5 hours of rubbing with sandpaper! Oh I forgot, I had to oxidise the top to get the letters black too. Then they got tumbled in a tumbler for polishing for 3 hours and then they were ready.

Phew!!!!

The ring is twists of wire, soldered together and bashed and flattened a bit. It's OK, but I can do better I think. It's a bit big.