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Hello from California
Hi,
My name is Will. I discovered metal working when I retired from an IT profession a few years ago. I make a lot of stuff that goes in the junk pile and I have just scratched the surface of metal forming, but I am enjoying the process. My main interest is lamp making and sculpture at this point. All the failed lamps turn into sculpture. (That's a joke....sort of). I am also doing electo-etching and vitreous enamel on much of the stuff that I do. I have a semi-large enamel kiln and I am working slowly on a spray booth. Other ways of applying vitreous enamel don't scale very well. I started with fold forming copper and silver and spent some time learning raising, sinking and forging for small scale objects by hand using sandbag, anvil and stakes. I joined the San Francisco Metal Arts Guild and met a copper smith who specialized in candle sticks. He introduced me to small power hammers, metal lathes etc. I have not added those to my shop, but I do have access to them. He also showed me that you could work with steel to make your own tools. Recently I discovered automotive sheet metal work (amazing stuff) and added (I mean jammed in) an eastwood bead roller with motor, a small English Wheel and a stretcher-shrinker to my workshop. A 3 in 1 break, shear, slip roller is on my wish list for next year. I bought that 5.5 inch top English Wheel that you can get on ebay for $140. You have to shim it in several places to get any alignment and I expect that any pro would laugh at it, but it works pretty well on small copper and aluminum pieces, or maybe I just don't know any better. When smoothing a dome it beats the heck out of bouging and planishing on a mushroom stake. It comes with six bottom wheels and they are pretty good. I hope to get a better one some day. I was very happy to find these forums. I have so much to learn that darn near every post is teaching me something.
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Will C |
#2
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Hi Will
welcome to the forum Peter
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P.Tommasini Metalshaping tools and dvds www.handbuilt.net.au Metalshaping clip on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEAh91hodPg Making Monaro Quarter panel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIpOhz0uGRM |
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