Inlay tutorial, silver owl in shibuichi Options

[Jim Kelso]

I've done up a tutorial on the inlay of the silver owl as seen earlier in the "metal painting" thread posted in new work.

You can see the tutorial HERE

Any comments or questions are welcome here.

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[Jim Kelso]

Whilst looking forward to Ford's nashiji, I'll post a bit of my own on a shibuichi(85%copper/15%silver) vase.
This as cast surface shows the graining to maximum advantage. Any project where you want this effect must be thinned(rolling or forging) as little as possible. On this piece you can see(along with the dust particles ) areas of general finer grain and areas of larger crystaline formations, some of which can be seen in the field above the peony.

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[Guest_ford hallam_*]

these two images (of the same piece of metal) will hopefully illustrate what I'm describing.

Actually Jim, the effect you see on your cast shibuichi vase is called "kesho" in Japanese. It's the dendritic structure that invariably occurs in "as cast" objects. It's a result of the rapid cooling and consequent shrinking of the molten metal. If you recall, a while ago, Garret McCormack posted some images of an ingot he'd cast and then forged down to make a tsuba. I commented on exactly this aspect of his piece at the time. This dendritic structure can often be seen in cast ingots of practically any of the cuprous alloys and of course copper itself. Incidentally, the term "kesho" is also applied to the fairly large crystalline structure seen in Sentoku alloys.

Nashiji is a completely different phenomena, whereas dendritic structure is generally broken down in the forging process when making sheet metal, true nashiji always remains visible. If you are finding that you have to keep the processing of the cast metal to a minimum in order to retain the apparent nashiji effect then the chances are that the metal was held at liquidus too long and the silver molecules have dissipated too much.

The piece posted below was cast as a hamburger type pattie into hot water and was forged down from about 12mm. It is now a tad under 1mm.