deep draw forming

We've been doing some fun things in class these last few days. I was able to get some deep draw forming tooling and we've been pressing some bowls that will form the basis for some commemorative chalices. We are able to take a 6" 18 gauge sheets and press this in one annealing. It's pretty amazing to watch. My students who took metalforming last semester are in awe at the fact that we can achieve these results in under one minute with the press. I look forward to experimenting more with this.

 

holy holes

Yesterday and today, I ran my Tormach CNC for Chloe (a senior Sculpture student at AppState) and created this drilled cross stitch pattern in steel sheet. She is planning on pressing these sheets with steel hoops and then putting patina on them, and then stitching the pattern with thread. She has several of these to make and I'm helping out since our mill at school it too small to run the bigger designs. This one has over 2,000 holes so I ran the mill super slow and just let it peck away at the design. I ran part of it yesterday and then paused the machine at night and started it back up this morning when I took off to weld at school. I came back to a broken bit, so I had to re-run part of the program. I still broke a few more bits as I'm using #52 bits for this. Regardless, it came out nice and she can get to work now. She'll have several more designs to do, so I'm hoping to run some of these on the ShopBot at school so she can go bigger, and so she can babysit the router instead of me running these in my own shop when I have other jobs to do. I guess it's good that I can do the first ones to confirm that everything is working well.

 

deep draw

theater weight hydraulic press

Bryan Cera just posted this cool little hydraulic press on his blog. It's similar to the design that Susan Kingsley has in her Hydraulic Press Metalsmithing book, but this one is way faster to make and uses some readily available pieces. The slabs you see are theater weights. Go have a read if you're interested in this one. This is slick, Bryan!