it rains a lot in the spring here in kentucky...

this is another gingko branch in copper. i am sending this to a friend that just moved to arizona as a house warming gift.

Very nice work Don. Your friend is very lucky. Now....if you want to pound out some countertops for me....that would be a lovely house warming for me!! Just kidding of course, very nice work though.

yes, nice work. have you ever done lampshades?

i have thought about lampshades, but the copper i am using right now is too thin, i need to find a source for thicker stock. i have also thought about doing copper cutout designs to put over art glass for a shade. not sure how it would work, but sounds interesting.

thanks for the comments.

Don,

Your idea of piercing copper sheet and then placing it over glass is a traditional technique during the A/C period. A jewelers saw would have been used to cut out the design, then the shade had been assembled from these cutout panels, tabs would have been soft soldered to the back of the panels to allow the glass to be secured. Same as used to secure the mica in a shade.

Fred

Don - Beautiful work! Chasing is intense and will make 8 hours feel like 15 minutes. My favorite!
Thicker stock - I use scrap copper most of the time that I buy from metal dealers by the pound. 60 to 70% is usually usable,,the rest is so badly bruised that I wind up selling back to them. Here is a trick for making flat stock - from tubing. With a common table saw, using a thin kerf carbide blade (Home Depot)- set your fence to half the diameter of the tube. Raise the blade only slightly higher than the thickness of the metal. Lube the blade with candle wax or soap. Slide the tube down the blade, cutting vertically from top to bottom. Now the tube is split. Anneal it. Soak in acid to clean. Spread it open with your hands and flatten it out on your bench or flat board with a rubber mallet. A 4 inch tube will yield a width of over 12 inches - the length will be whatever you've cut the tube to be. You can use any width tubing from 1 inch up to anything. The yield of flat stock will be Pi times the diameter.
While still in the 'tube' stage - file off any scratches, brand names, dings, etc. The older tube (pipe) is crimped and soldered - I cut two lines in the tube, chopping out the entire crimp with it's solder.
Dealing with used metal guys - pay them cash always and they'll call you when good clean stock comes in - check the stock and make sure it wasn't used for a chemical process - annealing that stuff can cause fumes that will kill you. 99% of it was used for water drainage, alcohol distillation or beer making.

Hey Don,
So I was just looking at your ginkgo branch design again and thought, WOW, that is really really cool. Could you do a quick run down of how you did it? Did you really do it in one day? What tools do you need? You can see where this is going...what do I need to do something like that? Where did you get the pattern etc etc... Is there a resource on the web for doing stuff like this? I know absolutely nothing about copper, but I like it.

Oh, and I might be going to see JC some time soon, it is about time for a new project...

I just looked at your first rainy day post and saw that it has most of the info on how you did it...we have a hobby lobby here, maybe I will check out what they have for copper work. Any chance you could post your gingko leaf pattern?

i dont really have patterns, i just draw on the copper and go from there.

here are two gingko drawings i did in sharpie and color pencil you could use as a start.