ChangesBracelets

 

Sawed and filed blanks of sterling silver. This was remarkably easy this time since I bought the silver in a thin strip and only had to saw and shape the ends. In the past I have sawed it out of my own silver blanks...and sawing by hand does not produce the perfect parallel lines I can get this way no matter how much I file and sand.
Hooray for working smarter not harder!

A few letters stamped one at a time.
I start with the center space/letter in the middle of the blank to be sure the phrase is centered.

No mistakes! Nothing (I have done this plenty of times) is more frustrating than prepping a blank only to make a letter mistake. A mistake at this point means melting the silver back down in the crucible and then rolling the silver flat again. Mistakes are costly because I do not have a rolling mill (2K). I'd likely scrap the piece and just have to just order new flat silver from the supplier.
Instead of getting the scrap price for my silver, I'm stashing my mistakes for the day I re-enroll in the silver class at Butler and can use Roger's tools. Yes, that takes a lot of effort and costs about as much as scrapping the silver, but I'd rather pay for more instruction than just new silver.

The next step is to scratch up the surface of the silver real good with the grittiest sand paper.
Seems counter to progress, right? (Sounds familiar.)
This is done because wherever the deepest scratch is at this point is the polish level.
In other words, deep scratching is done to level the silver.

Each sanding with each finer grit paper produces tinier and tinier scratches. In this photo the bottom blank (yes, I'm referring to the upside down bottom blank) is obviously already polished with a finer paper.
See how the scratches are larger on the top one? If a scratch isn't out with each finer paper, it never will be. This makes sense because the finer paper won't buff out what the grittier paper didn't get.

Finer and finer and finer. The scuffs are turning into a nice satin buff.

All buffed! I started with 150 and this photo shows all the way down to 1500 grit.

If the silver isn't too work hardened at this point it can be bent with mallets. If it's too brittle and hard it has to be put under fire again to redistribute the molecules. After refiring it would have to be "pickeled" and repolished.
Though this silver was now impossible to bend with by hand, I did not have to re-fire it
because it was "dead soft" to begin with and the thickness of the metal means it can take quite a few more
blows before hardening. I shaped these with a plastic mallet around a wooden mallet because
my wooden bracelet form is out at the farm in storage.

Taking shape nicely. (Yes, that's my wooden log that Cody gave me for my birthday several years ago.
It's much easier on the ears to steady and hammer silver over solid wood than a non-solid desk.

Buffed and shaped. At this point, the bracelets go into a spinning tumbler (think polished rocks).
I tumbled these all night last night and woke up to shine. I did hand polish with cloth to get this:

I included this photo because of how the silver on that bottom bracelet picks up the granite pattern like a mirror.
Yes, there is a copper version, too, because I always make a pattern in less expensive copper first.

Of course I had to post this one. Pretty perfect shapes!

The letters are not patina-ed black yet. I still have to find out if the customer wants them black.
My flex-shaft tool that I do the final polish with is also out at the farm. You won't believe the difference in the shine level after that. Trust me, it gets even more mirror like.  I'll post the final photos here soon.

I am obsessed with change, aren't I?