Skeleton Rex loves you. (Click to view.)
This was my first time working with solid metal. Zev and I visited a metalworking studio: Creative Metalworks School of Design in Kensington, MD. We ended up staying for the day. I made this little copper necklace, and Zev made a gorgeous metal version of Patricia Crawford's "Full-rigged Ship" origami model.
Hour 1: The disc is cut and the reference image is printed. Our hosts still don't realize how detail-oriented I am.
Hour 3: Potato-quality picture of the first pass of engraving. Without the vertebrae, rib, or tooth details, Ms. Rex looks like a smooth-skinned lizard.
The hardest part of this adventure was probably printing out the Jurassic Park logo at the right size using the studio's computer and printer. Printers are the worst. Once I had the logo printed, I used an X-Acto knife to cut the main features into a stencil. I left out the fiddly bits, so the rough template looked more like a plucked chicken than a Rex. (See the engraved, shiny silhouette in the image on the right.) I traced the design onto the disc using a Sharpie, and then hand-drew the ribs and teeth using the printout as a visual reference. (After watching Tim Minchin's "If I Didn't Have You", we realized that I'm from the parallel universe where I'm better at tracing.)
Apparently, a lot of metalworkers use dental drills to get the fine control they need. It makes so much sense! It's such a brilliant solution that I was surprised that I hadn't thought of it before, which is silly because it's a solution to a problem I had never ever considered before. Still, it's a good factoid. I've already deployed it at two parties.
So, I got to learn to use a dental drill (on teeth, even! The 2D kind). I started out engraving the middle of the Rex until I got the hang of things, and did the fiddly bits last. Like drawing or painting, the key is to go slow and stay focused. I knew I might screw up when I tried to buff and polish the necklace later, so I went over every part of the engraving at least three times to try to make it deep enough to survive my inexperience. The Sharpie ink smeared a little bit as time went on (and on and on), so I had to stop and redraw the outline every now and then.
Hour ??: Engraving is done. (Click to view.)
The liver of sulfur patina looks like a fossil. You can see a case of diamond drill bits propping up the piece. (Click to view.)
On the last pass, I crosshatched the vertebrae in alternating directions to help them stand out a bit more as distinct shapes. When the engraving was done, I bent a strip of copper into a loop and attached it to the back of the piece. I've tried soldering pennies together before during a late night in the computer lab. This was very different. The pennies needed some pressure and expert swears to stick together, and they could be broken apart just by being jostled. Working in the metal shop, I was a surprised by how firm the attachment was, even with the tiniest point of contact. The bond hardened very quickly, so I did a bit of re-melting to try to get a tighter seal.
When a copper piece is heated, it oxidizes, changing color quickly through oily rainbow hues. I ended up with a rosy pink color, which you can see on the left. (If you go back and look at picture of the original disc, which was scrap from someone else's project, you will notice that the top surface is even darker, almost purple.) The oxidized layer is very thin, so it only takes a quick polish to bring out the bright clean copper again. If ya don't polish too hard, the engraved surfaces remain untouched and retain their color. I liked the pink color but I wanted the T-Rex silhouette to contrast even more, so I added a patina using a liver of sulfur solution. The sulfur turned the whole piece a lustrous, satisfying shade of black.
The last thing I did at the metal shop was to buff the patina off the flat surfaces. It's a good thing I engraved so deeply, because the surface of the necklace wasn't fully level and I had a heck of a time trying to buff around the heart. I ended up buffing part of the surface at a slight angle, which was scary. But I got a gorgeous result!
And when I got home, dear reader, I did something drastically questionable. I knew that the necklace would tarnish quickly even from just being worn. I did a bit of research into other people's metalworking projects, and got an idea of what kind of waxes they use to seal their copper pieces, and how often they have to polish and reapply the stuff. And then I remembered that I had a bottle of clear nail polish lying around.
Nail polish is surprisingly sturdy, in my experience. I replaced the stickers on a Rubik's Cube with nail polish a decade or so ago, and it still looks great and performs well. I also painted a fresh rose stem with clear coat one time, just to see what would happen (all right, you got me, it was to see if it could make a viable Harry Potter wand). The whole thing dried and shrank as a unit. The polish wrinkled as the surface of the stem wrinkled, without cracking or peeling or turning colors. It can't preserve something the way that resin can, and it's not fully impermeable, but the integrity was still surprisingly good.
So even though I knew it might fog or yellow in the far future, and that metalworkers everywhere might be horrified to read this, I set up a jig to hold the necklace still and I put two layers of clear nail polish over the whole thing. It's been several years now, and the necklace still looks amazing. You can see the final result, nail polish and all, in the final picture... or around my neck at the sorts of parties where I run out of things to fidget with and wind up telling people about how metalworkers use dental drills.
