Stick.

[Jarhyn]

For my brother's wedding, a collaborative effort between my biological father and myself.

I designed the fittings, shaped the branch, and made all the drafts, and then he cast/machined/carved the fittings and put it together.

The stones in the gears are synthetic sapphire, the foot stone is a synthetic ruby, and the one in the top is a natural emerald.

If I had paid for the emerald, the overall material cost would be 1200 minus the branch. I would have preferred the fittings (other than the foot) had been made with metal art clay instead of they way they were made, but there was a communications issue and it turned out alright anyway.

 

[ZiprHead]

Ooh, that's cool.

My brother made his wife a walking stick. He put something similar to this but larger on the top of the staff.

 

[Jarhyn]

Ooh, that's cool.

Thanks! I love doing projects like this, but this one took many years to really fully realize.

The big bottleneck is actually getting sticks to dress/carve/shape, and having the means to make certain parts... Though metal art clay is fine too. I have another stick I'm going to be sending on to do another project with (an actual proper weapon this time: a rugged ironwood with a hardened foot).

The next one is going to hopefully involve some interesting inlays and twisted wire features, though I'll be doing most of the actual assembly myself this time, I hope.

 

[ZiprHead]

Can't wait to see the next one.

 

[Jarhyn]

Can't wait to see the next one.

Yer gonna have to! It'll be at least a few months 'till I have it finished.

 

[ZiprHead]

I'm not going anywhere.

 

[Jarhyn]

First attempt at true silversmithing: a simple silver ring.

I'm in Milwaukee today, and spent the day with my biological father. Yesterday I made a small center punch (also pictured), and today I made the ring.

Mostly made by myself with his tools and silver, originally we attempted to make a "coin ring" style ring his way, only for that to fail fairly badly.

When that failed, I melted the failure into a single bead, hammered that into a circle, and then used the centers punch to punch a hole.

From there, I melted out the center with a jeweler's oxyacetylene torch to expand it a couple times into a torus, and to clean up the torus shape, then hammered that out with a dishing tool on a dishing anvil.

Then I hammered it out on a ring mandrel, until it was hammered to about a size 16 with close to the right thickness, and then resized it back down by cutting it and welding the ends back together.

I hammered that to close to my actual ring size on the mandrel, and then centered the mandrel on the lathe to machine it to consistent thickness.

I hit it with a machinists' file on the lathe to shape it out, and then sanded out the inside with a bit of wood chucked into the lathe with sandpaper stuck to it, finishing it to 400 before I started buffing the inside the same way.

I sanded the outside of the ring to 1000 grit and buffed it out on a wheel.

At that point I slipped and the ring went rocketing across the room.

After fixing the shape with a wooden mandrel and rubber hammer (lol, it got bent from the force of pinging across the workshop and nearly getting lost in the mess in a corner), I polished up the outside of the ring to a mirror finish.

The ring is fine silver.

The centerpunch is steel from a socket wrench.

 

[Tharmas]

Very cool. My cousin was a goldsmith. I spent hours in his shop watching him work. I like the simplicity of the ring.

 

[Elixir]

Awesome. My brother’s wife teaches silversmithing, and I’ve always admired the focus and vision it requires.

 

[Jarhyn]

It's funny because I consider the centerpunch to be the harder thing to make.

The ring I already knew mostly what I was doing, because I could see the process I wanted to use.

There are some flaws in the ring, but they are mostly hidden on the inside of the band, or only visible from the edge, and largely caused by the fact that once I got it to about the right shape and size, I took the edge to melt again with the torch.

There's also a spot on it with a scar from where it impacted the floor, after losing control of it on the buffing wheel. I managed to hammer it to roundness again after, but the scar remains.

With the center punch I had to try hardening it three times, because the temper was temperamental. It turned out that I had to not even try putting a temper on it, because the heat from the hardening process kept it hot enough to temper as it quenched.

 

[Toni]

Pretty nice work!

 

[Jarhyn]

Pretty nice work!

Currently, I'm discussing with him about re-applying the same.process or similar using metal art clay to make a band for a ring fory husband, expanding the process to set a small ruby, as my husband would like a matching wedding ring as well. If this works out well, he may make more to sell, which I hope he does because that would turn a pretty penny on markup value.

The general idea (the stone is just set atop the band):

 

[Jarhyn]

Well this weekend was interesting to say the least. I have at least some hope that I'll be able to access the resources to set up the workshop I have wanted for decades: I had the courage and the opportunity to talk to my grandparents about my dreams, and they're the sort of folks who have the money to actually make that happen.

I'm just so tired of working to enrich other people who already have money, whose lives have been turned into a machine to squeeze the blood of people to make their wine.

But other than that, I also got the opportunity to have a few quiet afternoons with my grandparents again. Sure, with different grandparents, but... I missed that so much I started crying when I told him what it meant to me. Oh I cried so much last night when my MiL roared and decided to try and groom a cat with a sharp object while drunk. My husband was there for the cat, but that blowup landed right in our laps as my grandfather and I were chatting quietly about the skeletons in our closets.

I am not really sure he has anyone else in his family who makes anything, or who cares about building something. It's got to be lonely being in a family where the only other one to build anything is long since retired. I love my family, my husband's family, but they're all so superficial; none of them have fought to hold on to their dreams except my husband, and his engineer uncle has been out of the game longer than I've been in it. They forgot all their big dreams, trading them in for smaller ones along the way.

I come away from it with the slightest hope that I might get an opportunity again to build something, and not just trivial trinkets or a technology that nobody has vision around, but something grand... and I get this hope along with memories that remind me why I have my dreams in the first place.

...And maybe some hope that I'll have the opportunity in the coming months to tell my boss that he can suck it.