Long story short, I lobbied against "little yappy dogs" for years. That all changed in about 5 seconds when I met Zeus the Moose ( b&w) and Squeaky Enrique (tan & white). They were my best friends ever, except for my wife.
I've been kind of obsessed with this side-direction for a few Holiday seasons, and I'm starting early this year. Samples are 24 ga. (.021" to me) copper , brass, and Galvalume. The mold shown here uses a .050" thick shell of hardened 4130 steel, set in JB Weld steel reinforced expoxy. The shell has loops welded to it's underside to anchor it in the JB. I used a 1/2" thick 60-a urethane pad to do the forming in a hydraulic press. The parts are die cut. The Galvalume parts were formed with a mold made from a plate of steel with 1/16" welding rods soldered on, and the urethane pad. Oh, and one of the copper flakes was textured by rolling mill against an etched steel plate.
It's yellow brass sheet .032", hollow, stuck together with silver (brazing) solder. From 1978.
Inspired (seen in) the M.C. Escher print 'Stars'.
Some "recreational" sawing. 8/0 blades.
This was a fun one. Several techniques here were first-time tries for me. I did work as a silvermith and model maker for jewelry companies from '75-'86, so I have a few licks, but I like to experiment. Since I don't often make jewelry, I want to make it fun; an adventure, not a job ("It's not just a job, it's an adventure" is from an ancient TV commercial for the Navy). So...I got two of these stones and felt like I should do something special with them. Later I'll show the bigger one, which became a necklace. Oh, this is from around 2021.
This is about 23" across. The copper dodeca is hollow sheet, .032" thick. The outer Icosa is 1/4" stainless steel rod, and the small caps are copper. The Dodeca is suspended by connections hidden from camera view. NFS. I made this for me. I used Tin solder on the dodeca and brazing on the Icosa. Did I mention that this was a huge, big, giant P.I.T.A. ???!!! (^8 Oh... it's crooked, too. I have lots of process shots in a folder somewhere; it was a really interesting, challenging project. I had not had a lot of trouble soldering or brazing stainless until this one- not sure why, but the joints were so ugly I decided to cover them up with the caps, which were another level and way that I got my butt handed to me.
Two stars and one sphere , based on fairly simple polyhedral geometry. Basically , I make a Tinkertoy-like hub thatgoes at each vertex of a polyhedron . The simplest ones are a Cube (8 vertices) and Tetrahedron (4 vertices) and Octahedron (6 vertices). 3 of the 4 shown here are more complex, and the star additions are an extra layer of complexity on top of the basic polyhedral notion. So, it's easy to envison a cube with it's 8 corners and 6 square faces. The shot with me holding one is of a Cube. Each edge is a straight line....now if I use the hub to replace each straight line /edge with a pair of curved wires, it transforms each square face into a circle, and the whole figure into a spherical form.
Bracelet- Brass, Nickel Silver, and Copper on a Stainless Steel back. I used silver solder.