This past weekend I was able to take a class on jewelry and metalworking at The Crucible in Oakland; the tuition was covered as a Christmas gift. I thoroughly enjoyed the class, and learned enough to produce the rings shown below with minimal guidance. We covered stamping, sawing, filing, rolling, soldering, and finishing;the metals we worked with were silver, copper, and brass (primarily for cost reasons, gold is even more insanely expensive than I remembered.) The first ring in the gallery involved a lot of sawing and drilling, which I still need to improve with, as well as eight hard solder joints to hold the copper bits inside the silver voids. There were additional pieces generated during the stamping and embossing tutorials, but I'll keep the post here to the rings. My only frustration with the class was how quickly I ran out of ideas. I really wish I had walked in with a pile of concepts rather than just one or two! Definitely looking to obtain some of the tooling to continue this sort of work at home, and combine it with my lapidary / faceting aspirations.
Silver and copper ring - Roughly a DNA double-helixTextured copper ring 1 - SnakeskinCopper and brass ring - Triangle motifTextured copper ring 2 - Dots
My second real project in wood, a commander-sized deckbox, represented a step up in joint complexity and wood quality. I also had to deal with an unexpected issue, namely wood movement. The board of curly maple was purchased months ahead of time, with a couple different ideas in mind, and during that interval it went from a beautifully flat and square board, to a pringles-chip shaped board with slightly off-true edges. Had I been more motivated, I suppose I could have use a hand plane and pared it down to flat. With time at a premium, and a deep conviction that clamping and gluing can do amazing things, I did my best to roll with it.
I also tried to remember to take process photos as I went, not only to share here, but also for my own benefit the next time I kick off a project. The basic design was pretty simple: rabbet joints, rabbet joints everywhere. The four vertical walls of the box all get an eighth-inch deep 3/4 inch tall rabbet along their bottom edge to accommodate a beefy cheery base, and additional rabbets along the vertical edge for the left and right sides. One concern from the outset was the stability of cutting an eighth inch of material away from panels only a quarter inch thick, but going slowly, it did work out. Additionally, an eighth inch deep, quarter inch tall, slot was cut into the back and side panels to allow for a side-in lid. It's worth noting here that the lid had to be subtly tapered by sanding the edges meant to mate with the slots to allow for easy movement.
Raw materials
The raw materials were a 24" x 5" x 0.25" board of curly maple, and a 3/4" thick board of cherry (which I'd previously been using as a backstop to prevent tear-out when sawing). Both boards were wider than my miter box would allow, so I ended up using clamps and the straight edge of other boards to establish the cuts. In the photo below, the saw is neatly guided by straight-edged stock on both sides.
Sawing setupAll the pieces
With all the pieces cut, the front panel (notably 0.25" shorter than the others, to permit the lid to slide out) was off to the laser cutter. I should also note, the design is not mine, it was found here, and was simply too cool to pass up. Maple takes laser engraving very well, and even grey-scale depth features were rendered very well.
Laser-cut design
Unfortunately I forgot to take any photos during the routing step, but they were all executed with a 0.25" flat router bit at medium-low speed. For the finish, I wanted the grain to really pop, so I used the remainder of the board as a test piece (seen far left in the photo below). The top portion of the test piece got two coats of diluted anoline dye, then two coats of Danish oil, while the bottom simply got the oil. I settled on dye+oil again, but in retrospect should probably have gone darker (less dilute) on the dye. The blue-taped areas, aside from the test piece, were to exclude oiling the gluing surfaces.
Finishing
After a brief dry-fit, gluing and clamping went on for two days. I did have to make a second pass, as a small gap opened up in one of the corners, but after that it looked good.
Gluing and clamping
Finally, here are some photos of the final product!
I probably won't rely so heavily on rabbet joints in the future, but this was super instructive in the difficulties and details of executing them. Also, this came together more quickly than the first project! As I get my basic skills in line, things go a bit faster and smoother, but there's still seemingly infinite room still to grow.
