JPifrr- CfUstvy*. f y ■’ ~ •> Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 with funding from Getty Research Institute https://archive.org/details/silverworkjewelrOOwils_O THE ARTISTIC CRAFTS SERIES OF TECHNICAL HANDBOOKS EDITED BY W. R. LETHABY SILVERWORK AND JEWELRY THE ARTISTIC CRAFTS SERIES OF TECHNICAL HANDBOOKS. Edited by W. R. Lethaby. 'T'HE series will appeal to handicraftsmen in the industrial and mechanic arts. It will consist of authoritative state- ments by experts in every field for the exercise of ingenuity, taste, imagination — the whole sphere of the so-called “de- pendent arts.” BOOKBINDING AND THE CARE OF BOOKS. A Handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders, and Librarians. By Douglas Cockerell. With 120 Illustrations and Diagrams by Noel Rooke, and 8 collotype reproductions of bindings. i2mo. $1.25 net ’ postage, 12 cents additional. SILVERWORK AND JEWELRY. A Text- Book for Students and Workers in Metal. By H. Wilson. With 160 Diagrams and 16 full-page Illustrations. i2mo. $1.40 net $ postage, 12 cents additional. In Preparation : CABINET-MAKING AND DESIGNING. By C. Spooner. D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK. The Foundress’ Cup : Christ’s College, Cambridge. SILVERWORK AND JEWELRY A TEXT-BOOK FOR STUDENTS AND WORKERS IN METAL BY H. WILSON. WITH DIAGRAMS BY THE AUTHOR AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1903 Copyright, 1903 By D. Appleton and Company All rights reserved Published February , 1903 THE GETTY CENTER LIBRARY “ An Art can only be learned in the workshop of those who are winning their bread by it .” — Samuel Butler (“ Erewhon ”). “ One may do whate' er one likes In Art : the only thing is to make sure That one does like it — which takes pains to know.” — Robert Browning (“Pippa Passes” ). f< It is evident that the value of methods and apparatus so simple as these is dependent on the skill and talent of the worker who uses them . The hand of man 9 more perfect than any mechanism, is every- where seen in early goldsmith' s work. When , how- ever, mechanical methods develop, their exactitude , their even precision, their unintelligence, replace little by little that fascination which belongs to everything shaped by the human hand. One need not, therefore, be surprised that there is so much difficulty in the goldsmith' s art, no less than in other branches of in- dustry, in procuring, things to-day which have the charm of ancient work. Mechanism has destroyed the habit of intelligent personal effort on the part of the worker, and his energies are now directed to the imitation of the cold and arid regularity of the machine.'' — “On Medieval Gold and Silver Work ” (** Viollet le Due,” vol, ii., p. 172.) EDITOR’S PREFACE In issuing this volume of a series of Handbooks on the Artistic Crafts, it will be well to state what are our general aims. In the first place, we wish to provide trustworthy text-books of workshop prac- tise, from the points of view of experts who have critically examined the methods current in the shops, and putting aside vain survivals, are prepared to say what is good workmanship, and to set up a standard of quality in the crafts which are more especially associated with de- sign. Secondly, in doing this, we hope to treat design itself as an essential part of good workmanship. During the last century most of the arts, save painting and sculpture of an academic kind, were little considered, and there was a tendency to look on “ design ” as a mere matter 9 Editor’ s Preface Editor’s of appearance. Such cc ornamentation ” as Preface there was was usually obtained by follow- ing in a mechanical way a drawing pro- vided by an artist who often knew little of the technical processes involved in production. With the critical attention given to the crafts by Ruskin and Morris, it came to be seen that it was impossible to detach design from craft in this way, and that, in the widest sense, true design is an inseparable element of good qual- ity, involving as it does the selection of good and suitable material, contrivance for special purpose, expert workmanship, proper finish, and so on, far more than mere ornament, and indeed, that orna- mentation itself was rather an exuberance of fine workmanship than a matter of merely abstract lines. Workmanship when separated by too wide a gulf from fresh thought — that is, from design — inevitably decays, and, on the other hand, ornamen- tation, divorced from workmanship, is necessarily unreal, and quickly falls into affectation. Proper ornamentation may be defined as a language addressed to the eye ; it is pleasant thought expressed in the speech of the tool. In the third place, we would have this io series put artistic craftsmanship before people as furnishing reasonable occupa- tions for those who would gain a liveli- hood. Although within the bounds of academic art, the competition, of its kind, is so acute that only a very few per cent, can fairly hope to succeed as painters and sculptors ; yet, as artistic craftsmen, there is every probability that nearly every one who would pass through a sufficient period of apprenticeship to workman- and design would reach a measure of success. In the blending of handwork and thought in such arts as we propose to deal with, happy careers may be found as far removed from the dreary routine of hack labor as from the terrible un- certainty of academic art. It is desirable in every way that men of good education should be brought back into the produc- tive crafts : there are more than enough of us “in the city/’ and it is probable that more consideration will be given in this century than in the last to Design and Workmanship. Work in the precious metals, the sub- ject which is dealt with in the present 1 1 Editor’s Preface Editor’s volume, seems especially to have suffered Preface from the slavish methods introduced, per- haps, to compete with machinery, and from the general benumbing of the apti- tude for design which affected so many of the artistic crafts during the course of the last century. On the other hand, there have been signs of a danger that these crafts may be victimized by glaring affectations in design and by unashamed crudeness of manipulation. Of the two vulgarities — that of commercial dulness, and that of the blandishments which assume the name of “ new art the latter is likely to be by far the worse. On this question of design it is essential to guard oneself from a merely capricious originality, a striving for exaggerated ele- gance, and an endeavor to suggest ideas of luxury, which last is probably the most enervating and repulsive characteristic of certain forms of modern taste. Symptoms of these faults are often found in a preference for violent curva- ture of form, an introduction of unrelated splashes of enamel, and the over-insistence upon tool marks and chemically treated sur- faces. On the contrary, we should rather aim at reasonableness, at the natural de- 12 velopment of traditional forms, and at pleasant, unobtrusive finish. The true method of design is always growth, not rootless egoism. Of old the arts developed under the hand by the contact of tools and material. Now, for instance, it is far too customary to “ design/’ as it is called, the shape of some vessel, be it for silver, or glass, or potter’s clay, and then to coerce the ma- terial into the preconceived form. But " any one who has watched the process of throwing a pot on the wheel, of blowing glass, or of beating up metal out of the sheet, will have noticed how dozens of vitally beautiful forms are produced on the way to the final dulness predestined by the drawing. The best compliment to workshop practise is to study the old work stored in our museums, without intention to copy specific types, but to gather ideas generally applicable. From this point of view all ancient art is a vast encyclopedia of methods and ex- perience. The London student should frequent the Gold Room and Medieval Depart- ment of the British Museum, the general collection at South Kensington, and the *3 Editor’s Preface Editor’s marvels of the Indian Museum. He Preface should also study the devices on ancient coins, medals, and seals. It will be found that such systematic study will not only result in the accumulation of hints for trade purposes, but will be a true form of self-culture; for all history stands as a background to these objects bequeathed to us by past civilizations ; and the perfect knowledge of one thing includes the par- tial knowledge of many things. It is not for me to praise these books/ but I may be allowed to say that in both those now issued we have been given the best knowledge of expert craftsmen, who, having explored the past of the arts with which they deal, have been willing to give out the combined results of their ex- periments and study clearly and without reserve. W. R. LETHABY. 14 AUTHOR’S PREFACE This book does not deal with the his- tory of the jeweler’s art. It is intended as a practical guide to some of the more simple processes of the craft. The worst fault of such a text-book, intended in the first place for students, would be vague- ness. I have attempted to avoid this by describing the operations of each process consecutively from beginning to end. This of necessity causes a certain amount of repetition, but anything is better than doubt. For the sake of clearness the various chapters have been written round the diagrams inserted in the text. These in most cases have been drawn from work actually carried out. It is not, however, my intention to im- pose conceptions of design upon the student, but only to describe methods I have found to give the best results in u Author’s Preface ' Author’s my own workshop. These methods, with Preface such changes as the common sense of the worker will suggest, may be applied to objects of whatever form carried out in the same materials. No student worthy of the name would attempt to copy the designs for himself. Not only is deliberate copyism dishonest, it checks the development of the student’s native powers and stunts his individuality. And while nothing is more pitiable than a too conscious cultivation of our poor little personality, whatever is felt to lessen our power of work in any direction must be studiously avoided and whatever helps us eagerly sought. If the student will study methods, materials, and natural forms, perfect his skill in handiwork, feed his imagination on old work, attend faith- fully to his instincts, his personality can safely be left to take care of itself. It will infallibly find expression. One most valuable stimulus to the imagination is to be found in the de- scriptions of marvelous metal work by old writers, poets, historians, and travelers. The old inventories of church plate, though they do little more than catalogue the objects, yet will often give most sug- 16 gestive hints for design. What could be finer than this from the inventory of the jewels and relics belonging to the cathe- dral church of Sarum, made by Master Thomas Robertson, treasurer of the same church, in the year 1536: — “ Item, a cross with Abraham offering up Isaac, and a lamb behind him with an angel (wanting one wing) and on the left side the images of Abel and Cain, weighing 63 ounces and a quarter.” One sees the thing through the old scribe's eyes, and straightway the mind begins to work on a scheme of its own. Another valuable aid is that given by old descriptions of methods and processes. The treatise of Theophilus, published by Murray, contains many hints. The trans- lator, however, not being a craftsman, missed many points in his rendering, and the technical descriptions are not as clear as could be wished. I have endeavored to rectify this defect in the new renderings given at the end of this book ; but Hen- drie’s Theophilus will always be full of interest to those curious in the arts of the Middle Ages, It is, of course, impossible in a limited space to treat of a limitless art; moreover, 2 17 Author’s Preface Author’s many processes, such as wet and dry Preface coloring of gold, die-stamping, gold- lapping, frosting, and electroplating and typing have too little connection with art to be considered at all. I hope, however, that the processes described in this book may help the student to acquire a tech- nique for himself. If it does anything, however slight, in that direction its object will have been achieved. H. W. 18 CONTENTS Editor’s Preface ..... Author’s Preface ..... PAGE 9 Contents 15 CHAPTER I Introduction ...... 25 CHAPTER II Materials — Educational Value of Process — Com- position of Pickle — Pitch for Repousse Work 29 CHAPTER III Tools ....... 33 CHAPTER IV Work Benches — Best Form of Bench — The Pin — The Skin — Tool Rack — Board Sweep . 36 CHAPTER V Wire-Drawing — The Draw-Bench — Draw- Plate — Tube-Drawing — How to Make a Draw-Plate ..... 39 CHAPTER VI Repousse Work — Chasing — Method of Proce- dure — How to hold the Tools — The Beha- vior of Metal — Work in the Round — The Chasing of Castings .... 44 CHAPTER VII Hammer Work — How to Make a Cup — Bossing up — The Stakes — Planishing — How to 19 PAGE Contents Make a Beaker — Snarling-Irons — Orna- mentation — Base for a Cup — Soldering the Base in Position — Polishing — Another Method for Beakers — The Use of the Sand-bag — Interlocking Joints for Hammer Work — Drinking Cup with a Stem . 51 CHAPTER VIII Candlesticks — The Socket — The Shaft — The Scorer — The Knop — The Base — Fitting Together — Polishing — A Simpler Form of Candlestick . . . . .68 CHAPTER IX Spoons — The Shape of the Bowl — The Stem — The Handle or Thumbpiece — Joining the Bowl and Handle — Second Method of Ma- king a Spoon — Third Method — Boxwood Punches — The Lead Matrix — Ingots for Handles ...... 79 CHAPTER X Silver Solder — Use of Scrap Silver — The Cru- cible — The Ingot Mold — Enameling Solder — Solders for Large Work — Howto Make Ingot Molds . . . . .87 CHAPTER XI Soldering — Use of Borax — The Blowpipe — Sol- dering Lamps . . . . .92 CHAPTER XII Settings — The Kinds of Stones to Use — Close Settings — Setting the Stone — Open Set- tings — Paved Settings . 20 97 CHAPTER XIII PAGE Contents Rings — Hoop Rings — Making Compound Wire * — The Knot Ring — Polishing — The Wreath — The Filigree Table Ring — An- other Form — The Carved Ring — The Design of Rings . . . . .104 CHAPTER XIV Necklace — How Designed — The Arrangement of Stones — Chain-making — Filigree Mounts for Pearls — Backing the Pearls — Woven Links — The Snap — Polishing — Another Form of Necklace — What to Study — How to Use your Studies — Pendants — Sugges- tions for Design — Loop for the Pendant — Cleaning and Polishing . . .112 CHAPTER XV Brooches — Suggestions for Design — Mounting - — The Making of Compound Twists — The Joint and Catch . . . .130 CHAPTER XVI Pendants — Things to be Avoided — Suggestions for Design — The Use of Enamel — Setting the Enamel — The Hoop for the Pendant — Polishing . . . . * 1 3 7 CHAPTER XVII Hair Ornaments and Combs — Silver Hairpin— The Skeleton Sphere — Hardening the Pin — A Comb in Silver — How to Make the Prongs — The Joint — The Head of the Comb — Arranging the Stones — The Groups 21 Contents of Leaves — The Pin for the Hinge — Set- ting the Pearls — How to Drill Pearls CHAPTER XVIII Bracelets — The Hammered Bracelet — The Hinge Bracelet — The Band — The Snap — The Hinge — Fitting the Joints — The Flex- ible Bracelet — Cleaning and Burnishing CHAPTER XIX Gold Work — The Care of the Material — Board Sweep — Method of Treatment — Alloys — Hair Ornaments — The Ingot — Drawing the Wire — Making Grains — Leaves — Flowers — Gold Solder — Nine-Carat Gold for the Pin — Study of Old Work . CHAPTER XX Gold Necklace with Pendant Fleurs de Lis — The Brass Mold — Burnishing the Gold over the Matrix — Another Method of Ma- king Fleurs de Lis — Engraved Matrices CHAPTER XXI Locket or Pendant Casket — The Frame — The Bezel — The Hinge — The Back — Fitting the Hinge — The Joint Tool — Swivel Loops ...... CHAPTER XXII Carving in Metal— Where Carving is Necessary — Making the Tools — Tempering — The Wax Model — The Use of the Chisels — Finishing — The Spiral Knop — The Wreathed Setting .... 22 PAGE H5 .56 168 177 183 187 CHAPTER XXIII PAGE Contents Casting — The Cuttlefish Mold — Flasks — The Loam — Smoking the Mold — Slate or Bath- brick Molds . . . . .193 CHAPTER XXIV Enamel Work — General Considerations — Requi- sites — Cloisonne Work — Filling the Cells — Mounting the Enamel — Champleve Enamel — The Tools — Use of Gold Solder — Limoges Enamel — Network Enamel — Setting the Enamel — Deep-cut Enamel . 200 CHAPTER XXV Hinge for Casket — Drawing the Tube — The Mandrel — The Liner — The Joint Tool- — Soldering the Joints — The Pin . . 223 CHAPTER XXVI Moldings — The Swage - Block — Filing the Grooves — Drawing the Metal . . 228 CHAPTER XXVII Polishing — Materials Required — Polishing Silver Work — A Simpler Method — Burnishing — Polishing Gold Work — Care of Polishing Waste — Cleanliness of Tools . . . 231 CHAPTER XXVIII Coloring, Darkening, or Oxidizing Silver and Gold Work — Materials Required — Dark- ening Gold — Coloring Copper . . 235 CHAPTER XXIX Various Methods of Gilding — Mercury Gilding 237 23 Contents CHAPTER XXX PAGE A Method of Shaping and Cutting the Softer Precious Stones — The Stones most easily Cut — The Cements Required — Drilling Stone — The Engraver’s Lathe — Polishing . 240 CHAPTER XXXI Piece - Molding — The Model — The Casting - Flasks — The Sand — Filling the Flasks — Making the Mold — The Charcoal — The False Cores — The Back Mold — The Core of the Model — Arranging the Gates — Dry- ing the Mold ..... 244 CHAPTER XXXII Casting by Waste -Wax Process — The Wax Model — The Sand — Casting the Mold — Bedding the Mold in the Flasks — Casting without Flasks — Hollow Castings — A Third Method of Casting . . *256 CHAPTER XXXIII f On Inlaying ...... 262 CHAPTER XXXIV On Old Work and Old Methods . . .264 Notes on the Collotype Plates . . 283 Collotype Reproductions. . . .289 Medieval Cups and Chalices ( Illustrations ) 321 Practical Recipes, etc. . . . .327 Glossary . . . . . . 33 1 Index . . . . . . -339 24 CHAPTER I INTRO DUCTION The exquisite jewelry of Egypt, Etruria, and Greece, work so fine as almost to appear miraculous, was the outcome of centuries of development. What remains to us is the sum of a series of small im- provements in work and method, added by one generation of craftsmen after another. Each worker brought his frac- tion of beauty to the store laid up and bequeathed to him by those who had gone before. The men who made these things which fill us all with wonder had, however, not only inherited skill to guide their hands and eyes. Each went through a long apprenticeship, during which he was made free of the results of an un- broken tradition of craftsmanship. His work lay almost in the open air ; there was beauty in all his surroundings, 2 5 Intro- duction Intro- and inspiration waited on him continually, duction As always the happiness of the worker was reflected in the work. Each seems to have been content if he could surpass by ever so little the skill of his forbears. Yet the farther the discoveries of archeology take us back into the past, the more clearly we see by what slow, tentative, almost stumbling steps that perfection of skill has been attained. Between the prehistoric fibula hammered out from a nugget of ore and the granu- lated cloak-clasp of Etruria and Greece the distance is enormous, yet we are able to follow the line of development and almost to mark its stages. Apart from the fact that this gradual perfecting of craftsmanship has been the way to excel- lence in the past, it is the only way by which the student can attain to confidence and knowledge. Lacking these no one can give adequate expression to his ideas. Not only does the study of methods and the qualities of material enable him to give expression to an idea, it is absolutely the most fruitful source of ideas, and those which are suggested by process are invariably healthy and rational. The hand and the brain work together, and 2 6 the outcome of their partnership is a sanity of conception, which is greatly to seek in most even of the best work of to-day. The reason is perhaps that the zeal of the artist has not been tempered by knowl- edge. The reason of this again is that for more than a century the painter and the sculptor have stood before the public as the sole representatives of the Arts, and in consequence all the crafts and arts have been approached pictorially, even by those who practise th^m, as if each were only another form of picture-making. This is not wholly untrue, only the methods of the painter do not always apply in the crafts. Take as the simplest example a Rhodian earring. What is it? — a rough pearl, a skeleton cube of gold wire, a tiny pyramid of beads, and a hook. What could be more simple ? yet the cunning collocation of these ele- mentary forms has produced a thing of beauty that can not now be surpassed. No amount of fumbling with a pencil could ever lead to a like result. The material was there in front of the crafts- man, and on the material the creative idea engendered the work of art. Art is craftsmanship plus inspiration ; and 27 Intro- duction Intro- inspiration is the rush of unconscious duction memory along channels made by a habit of craftsmanship. The craftsmanship of the early workman was frank and fearless, the worker of to-day hides behind the stones he uses. His material is a screen and not a medium of expression. Stones and jewels to the early artist were means of adding emphasis to his work, or were used as the germ of a design ; by the modern they are used as substitutes for design. To the former the jewel was an added beauty to the setting ; to the latter the jewel is a means of hiding the setting and the workmanship. The old workman took the rough crystal of sapphire, or ruby, or emerald, and polished it, keeping the stone as large as possible, displaying to the utmost its native beauty. The modern workman splits and cuts his gems into regular, many-faceted, geometrical forms of infinite ingenuity and intolerable hideousness. The modern method of cutting equal- izes the color and intensifies the glitter of the gem, but the glitter takes away that mysterious magical quality, that inner luster of liquid light, which for the artist is its chiefest beauty, and replaces that 28 beauty by a mechanical sheen offensive to every cultivated eye. Moreover, the machine-made perfection of the cut stone has, as it were, reacted on the mounting, and is, perhaps, one cause of the mechan- ical hardness and lack of artistry so visible in modern work. The student who is seeking to avoid these defects must begin at the beginning, learn thoroughly the rudiments of his craft, and build up his system of design by slow degrees out of the results of his daily experience. He must learn to rely at first on excellence of handiwork as the foundation of his claim to be considered an artist. The one guiding principle of all true crafts- manship is this : the forms used in design should express naturally and simply the properties of the particular material employed. CHAPTER II Materials — Educational value of Process — Composi- tion of Pickle — Pitch for Repousse Work The student will probably find that it is better at first to buy his silver plate already rolled to the thickness required, 29 Intro- duction Materials Materials and have the wire drawn by the dealer; but later on he will find that he can draw small quantities of wire with a draw- plate fixed in a vise, and with a little care and practise he can thin out small ingots of metal on a stake or small anvil to any required thickness. He will in this way get a knowledge of materials quite impossible of attainment under any other conditions. The old craftsmen took full advantage of the native quali- ties of their materials, and these can only be learned by daily practise in working them. In the process of work ideas are matured which would otherwise have lain dormant and useless. The design gradu- ally acquires those indefinable qualities of naturalness, simplicity, and sincerity which are found to a supreme degree in almost all old work. The copper used should be of the best quality procurable. French or Swedish copper, such as is used for enameling, is the best. For cloison wire, alloy copper, which is very nearly pure, should be used. Electrotype copper, which is very pure, can be used to alloy silver and gold, but in all your work avoid electrotypes. They are an abomination to all who 30 have any regard to the qualities which are produced by handiwork. For tools the finest tool steel in round, square, or flat bars should be used. A few pounds of block tin will be useful for making molds, and for use as a block on which to stamp up with punches small beads, disks, and leaves. It is less yielding than lead for this purpose and gives a cleaner result. It can also be used as a backing for work in thin sheet silver or gold. Much Etruscan work was backed in this way. The impressed orna- ments on medieval chalices were often filled and attached to the body of the work by tin used both as solder and filling. A block of zinc, weighing about 3 lbs., will also be useful for making molds in which sheet metal can be roughly beaten up to shape ready for chasing. Brass wire of different sizes is useful for making temporary pins for joints, and, if of good quality, can be used in making silver solder. Binding-wire of several gages, ranging from 18 to the finest, will also be wanted for tying work together while being soldered. Borax should be bought in crystals. 3 1 Materials Materials A small piece of slate on which to grind it up can be got anywhere. A small quantity of sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, and nitric acid will be wanted for the various pickling solu- tions. They should be obtained from a wholesale chemist. Nitric acid pickle — i part nitric acid and 6 parts water. Sulfuric pickle — i part acid and 6 parts water. Hydrochloric pickle — i part acid and 8 parts water. A pound or two of best boxwood sawdust will be wanted and kept in an ordinary biscuit box. It is used for drying the work after washing. The drying can be hastened by putting the box on an iron plate supported over a spirit-lamp or gas flame. The sawdust must not be allowed to burn or the work will be stained and the stain is rather difficult to remove. Picch for repousse work is best made as follows — Pitch ... 4 parts. Rosin . . . 4 „ Plaster of Paris . 2 „ 3 2 Melt the pitch and rosin together in a pipkin, and when both have been well mixed and stirred, put in a small knob of tallow or an inch or two of tallow candle and again stir the mixture. Now add the plaster by handfuls and stir it in well. Then pour it out into a box well whitened with dry whitening, and leave it to cool. For winter work the pitch may be found too hard.. It can be softened by remelt- ing and adding another piece of tallow candle to the mixture. Some boxwood sticks, J inch square, for polishing will be very useful. A horn mallet is almost necessary for raising work, while a few different sized stakes to fix in the vise for hammer work are quite indispensable ; very good ones can be made out of poker heads or the handles of fire-tongs. CHAPTER III Tools The tools most likely to be required are : For Repousse work — Chasing hammers (fig. 6), two sizes, one heavy and one light. 3 Materials Tools 33 Various punches or chasing tools (fig. 7). An assortment of these, from forty to fifty, will probably suffice for most simple work. Except for very special purposes, such as touching up cast work, avoid the use of matting tools, or tools intended to produce a patterned or granulated sur- face. It is far better to rely on model- ing and design for producing variety of surface. A set of doming punches for doming the metal, and a small doming block. A set of files— round, flat, and three- square — and a set of needle files. A pair of slide pliers. A set of ordinary scorpers. A set of engraving scorpers. A few draw-plates. These can often be purchased second-hand. Snarling irons. These you can make for yourself out of lengths of bar steel. A small cold chisel. A bench vise. Those which revolve on a pivot are the most useful for general purposes. A joint tool for making hinges. Two or three pliers — round-nosed, flat, and ordinary. 34 Two pairs of cutting shears, one straight and one curved. A jeweler’s frame saw and fine piercing saws. A square bench stake, which can be of steel. The bottom of a flat-iron will do equally well for this. A few slips of boxwood for making punches and for light mallets will be found very useful. A drill stock, which should be one of the ordinary Swiss centrifugal drills. The drills for this can either be bought or made as the student desires. A sand-bag, a pitch block with a leather collar to keep the work in its place, and a blowpipe and some form of spirit-lamp with a good large flame, will complete the list of students’ require- ments. The student should make as many tools as possible for himself This is particularly the case with drills, repousse tools, and dies and punches of all kinds. In fact, there is very little indeed that the student can not make for himself Apart from the valuable experience to be gained in this way, a tool that is made for a particular purpose is almost always 35 Tools Tools Work Benches better than one that is bought ; while the pleasure of having made it for one- self more than compensates for the trouble. CHAPTER IV Work Benches — Best form of Bench — The Pin — - The Skin — Tool Rack — Board Sweep The best bench for the worker is “the French or jeweler’s bench/’ which con- sists (fig. 2) of a hard beech board with a semicircular hole cut out of the front to receive the body of the worker when seated. In the center of this bow, a small wedge-shaped piece of wood called “ the pin ” is inserted to form a rest for the work when filing or engraving. The bench should stand very firmly n and be fixed to the floor, so that there is no spring in the board when struck with the hammer. Underneath the board, around the bow of the semicircle, a leather sheepskin is nailed to form a receptacle for the filings of gold and silver and to hold the tools while work- ing. Many jewelers prefer tin trays to catch the filings, but the latter have this 3 6 disadvantage, that work dropped from Work the bench is more likely to be injured Benches Fig. i . on the tray than if it fell into the skin. On the right-hand side of the bow the 37 Work flame for the blowpipe should be ar- Benches ranged (see fig. i, which shows a bench arranged for five workers). If gas be used the ordinary bench blowpipe is fixed sufficiently near to the edge to enable the flame to be directed toward the center of the semicircular space. If a lamp be 3 * used it would naturally be placed in the same relative position. There should be a rack at the side of the bench for tools, arranged so that the tools can be reached with the least possible loss of time and temper. Fixed on the floor underneath the bench you may have a movable grating of wood to catch any stray filings, and to pre- vent those which fall from being trodden into the floor and lost. The bench and the floor underneath must be swept every day and the sweepings preserved. When a sufficient quantity has been gathered, the sweep should be burned in an iron tray to remove any trace of organic matter, the resulting ash well tried over with a magnet to remove any bits of iron wire, and the sweep sent to the refiners, who, after making an assay, will allow for the precious metal it may contain. CHAPTER V Wire-Drawing — The Draw -Bench — Draw-Plate- — Tube-Drawing — How to make a Draw-Plate Wire is made by drawing short rods of metal either by hand or by means of a 39 Work Benches Wire- Drawing Wire- Drawing 40 Fig. 3. draw-bench (fig. 3) through the successively diminishing holes in a draw-plate (fig. 4). If the rods are small in section and the quantity of wire required is also small, the draw-plate can be fixed in a bench-vise and the rods drawn through by hand. To do this, first hammer the end of the rod taper so that it will come through the hole nearest in size to the diameter of the rod. This taper tip must be strong enough— when it has come through — to stand the pull of a hand-vise. Rub the rod with beeswax and draw it through the plate ; the rod will be found thinner and longer. Do this with the next hole, and the next, until you have drawn it down to the required size, taking care to anneal it frequently as each drawing naturally hard- ens and compresses the sub- stance of the rod. If the wire has to be very much reduced in size, or if there is a large quantity to do, it will be better to use a draw-bench, but the principle of the operation is the same in both cases. V. V : : V. ; \ : % v : \ \ s. % Fig. 4. Wire- Drawing 41 Tube- Small tubes can also be drawn in this Drawing wa y out of strips of sheet metal. Cut a strip of metal of the length and thickness you require, and the breadth roughly thrice the intended diameter of the tube ; cut the end taper and with a hammer form it into a sort of gutter lengthwise ; anneal it and oil it or rub it over with a little beeswax inside and out and put the taper tip through the wide end of the hole which most nearly fits ; insert the tip of a pointed burnisher under the hollow of the trough of the metal and into the back of the hole (fig. 5), then draw the metal through the hole. The burnisher helps to keepthemetal true as it folds round it while being drawn through the hole. The rough tube which results from this operation is annealed and drawn through the next smaller hole, and so on until the desired size is attained. The student will find this very useful in the preparation of tubing required for hinges of brooches, lockets, boxes, and caskets. If the tube is not large in diameter all the work can be done in the vise and without a draw-bench. Hollow tubes of any section can be drawn by using draw-plates with holes of the required section, or the student can 42 Tube- Drawing Fig. 5. 43 Tube- make his own draw-plate out of an old Drawing flat file, first softening it, then punching graduated holes with a taper punch of the required section filed up out of bar steel and properly hardened. The taper must be very slight or the edge of the hole will be too sharp, and will strip the metal in- stead of compressing it. There are very few things necessary in the workshop which a student can not make for himself. The curse of modern work- shops is the dependence of the workmen on machine-made things. Rather than melt an ingot and roll a small piece of metal for himself to the exact size he needs, he cuts a strip from a sheet in stock which is nearest to the size. The effect on the work is de- plorable. The chief beauty — the quality given by human handiwork — is absent, and nothing can make up for the loss. CHAPTER VI Repousse Work — Chasing — Method of Procedure — How to hold the Tools — the Behavior of Metal — Work in the Round — The Chasing of Castings Repousse work is modeling in relief pro- duced by working with hammer (fig. 6) and punches (fig. 7) on the back of a sheet 44 of metal fixed on some yielding material. Chasing is work on the face of the sheet. The term is also used for finishing up the surface of castings. The required relief may be obtained either by beating down the ground of the ornament, or by punch- ing out the back and afterward finishing on the face. If the relief required is very slight, it may be obtained by laying the sheet 45 Repousse Work Repousse Work of metal I fl " c 0 ( punches 46 on a block of lead, a piece of soft pine, or on a piece of thick cork matting. For higher relief the metal must be laid on a composition of pitch made as already de- scribed. The tallow makes the composition more yielding, and more will be required in the winter than in the summer. * The metal is warmed and laid 1 upon the pitch block (fig. 8). I A tracing of the pattern is secured to the metal by bits of wax at the corners. With a fine - pointed punch the outline is delicately pricked through to the surface of the metal. Or, if the work is too delicate to admit of this, the design may be transferred with carbon paper. This done, take rounded punches and beat down the ground of the ornament according to your intention. Get the relief gradually, let the blows be even in force, guide the that the resulting furrow so makes a continuous surface and follows Repousse the form you may desire to express. At w °rk frequent intervals warm the metal on the surface, remove it from the pitch, and anneal it by making it red hot. This makes the metal yield more freely Fig. 8. to the blows of the punch. If this pre- caution is neglected the work will crack. By removing the metal from the pitch an opportunity is given of correcting any error from the front or back as the case may be. Punches with sharp edges 47 Repousse must be avoided until the last stages, Work or the metal will tear. A few shaped as in fig. 9 will be found very useful for modeling the surface. The student should practise until the trace of the punch on the metal is smooth and even from beginning to end, and the lines from the tracer clear and unbroken. Unless this Fig. 9. is done much time will be spent in cor- recting defects which might have been avoided. Endeavor from the first to acquire the right method of handling the hammer and holding the punch. Any chaser will show this in a moment. In case none is at hand the appended diagram (fig. 10) will make it clear. The punch is held between the thumb and the first 48 and second fingers, the top of the third finger rests on the metal as a pivot and guide. A little practise will make this action, at first difficult, afterward almost unconscious. Fig. io. In high relief work the relief is pro- duced by alternately working on the back and front ; driving the ground down from the front and the form out from the back. With care, patience, and many annealings, work may be done almost in the round. For this work punches, shaped somewhat like the tip of the 4 49 Repousse Work Repousse, thumb, are most useful for getting the Work relief from the back, and rounded faced punches for the work on the front. These must be made by the student himself. In all repousse work the main thing is to realize that metal is plastic, and with care can be led into forms or spread over surfaces like so much hard wax. This is especially true of copper, fine silver, fine and sovereign gold. Brass, even the best, is much less tractable. The student should be ever alert to seize the suggestions of decorative treat- ment of the metal which constantly arise while his work is in progress. The behavior of the metal is more instructive than any teacher. Avoid the use of matted or grained surfaces except in cast work. IVork in the Round .— Small objects — birds, animals, little figures — may be done in repousse by making the bodies in two halves. Solder the two together, in the way described farther on, leaving a small hole in the back or where it will least be seen. Fill the inside with pitch. This must be done by putting in small pieces and warming the object over the lamp. It may be found, however, that the pitch boils over and therefore that the object 5 ° will not be filled up properly. You must then take soft pitch and with a metal spatula or the flat end of a chasing tool press the pitch into the hollow, warming the metal from time to time. Castings are chased as follows. The rough productions and the pour which is left where the metal ran into the mold are first sawn off, the marks of the seams are removed by small chisels, the object is then warmed and fixed to the pitch-block, and the surface modeled over with mat- ting punches. Vents and other defects in the casting are remedied by soldering pieces of solid metal to make good the deficiency. Holes are drilled out cleanly, and pegs of metal screwed in, filed down, and chased to the required surface. CHAPTER VII Hammer Work — How to make a Cup — Bossing up — The Stakes — Planishing — How to make a Beaker— Snarling-Irons — Ornamentation — Base for a Cup — Soldering the Base in Position — Polishing — Another Method for Beakers — The Use of a Sand-bag — Interlocking Joints for Ham- mer Work — Drinking Cup with a Stem Take a sheet of metal, size 14 if the cup is to be small to 16 if the cup 5 1 Repousse Work Hammer Work Hammer Work is fairly large. Cut out a circle the diameter of which is a little larger than the contour of the cup. Take the compasses and lightly scratch on one side of the sheet a series of concentric circles, the smallest about an inch in diameter, increasing the radius of the succeeding circles by \ inches. These circles are to guide the hammer strokes. Now take a round-headed boxwood mallet Fig. 12. and beat the metal into a rough cup shape by beating it into a cup-shaped hollow in a wooden beating-block. This rough cup or shallow bowl must now be hammered into shape with a hammer shaped as in fig. 12 on a stake shaped as in fig. 13. Then begin on the inside and with the round-faced hammer, and keeping the elbow close to the side, beat S 3 Hammer Work Hammer round in circles, using the hammer from Work the wrist and not from the elbow. Re- peat this, taking care to keep the blows in concentric circles and to work regu- larly until the metal begins to take shape and to feel springy. Then anneal it, and, still using the same stake, beat on the outside from the innermost circle out- ward, taking care to leave the thickness of the brim untouched. It may happen that the cup has become uneven in shape ; this can be remedied after heating by beating it out again from the inside, with the box mallet, into the cup-shaped de- pression on the beating-block. Care must be taken not to stretch the metal unduly while doing this. The work is then continued and is 54 almost wholly done from the outside, Hammer still keeping the blows in circles, turning Work the cup round with the left hand. A skilful hammerman at this stage, by regulating the inclination of the hammer face, can drive the metal in any direction, thickening the rim or the bottom or the sides of the cup as may be necessary. After the shaping of the cup is com- pleted, it must be planished by using a hammer with a polished face, on a stake also polished for this purpose. When carefully done this leaves the surface true and bright and covered all over with brilliant facets. This method produces a cup beaten out of one piece. The form can naturally be varied at will, but it will often be found that the shapes taken by the cup during the progress of the work are much more interesting than those we set out to do. These suggestions of form should always be noted and worked out, either when the work in hand is done or frankly adopted as they arise. The beaker form (fig. 15) is pro- duced by the use of different stakes (fig. 14) or the beck-iron. Cut out your metal to the required size, making the diameter of the circle equal to the whole 55 Hammer Work 56 Fig. 14. Hammer Work Fig. 15. 57 Hammer length of the profile line you propose Work (fig. i^a). Make a central circle the size of the base of the beaker and place the tip of the curved stake against this line; on this drive the metal away from you by regular strokes of the rounded edged hammer. Keep the circles of blows concentric and the blows even in force. The metal will probably assume some- Fig. 16. thing of this section after a short time. The recurved edges must be driven out- ward on the stake with the mallet 58 (fig. 14) and the work of the hammer resumed until the general shape has been attained. It can now be planished as before described. The body of the beaker or cup may be decorated with raised surfaces (fig. 15), produced from the inside by using snarling-irons (fig. 17). These are cranked punches Z- shaped with ends of different form ; one arm of the Z is fixed in the vise, the other adjusted beneath the part of the cup which is to be raised. The Use of the S n ar ling- 1 r on . —The cup is held in position with the left hand, and the long arm of the snarling-iron struck smartly with the hammer at A. This causes the point of the snarler to strike against the inner side of the cup with nearly the same force as the original 59 Hammer Work Hammer blow. This method is employed where- Work ever it is impossible, owing to the depth of the cup or bowl, to use the hammer or a tracing tool, and with care almost any amount of relief can be obtained. But as the metal is not supported by pitch, which not only deadens the force of the blow but holds the metal up against the blow, much less force must be employed, and the operation of raising must be more gradual. When you have brought the cup, by the use of the hammer, to the shape you require, and have planished it and made its shape true, it can be filled with pitch and fixed on a pitch-block or on a sand-bag and com- pleted from the face with chasing tools. Ornamentation. — Whatever ornament you require must be such as expresses or emphasizes the forms of the cup. Spiral lines or flutes or ribs, or combinations of these, may be made to produce the most delightful variations of surface. Lozenges, zigzags, chevrons, any one of these absolutely elementary forms, repeated rhythmically on the surface, will produce the pleasantest effect. You must not set them out too exactly — trust rather to eye and hand; the variation 60 from geometric accuracy reveals the human worker, and it is the trace of the human touch which makes the meanest material precious. A cup with a narrow wreath of strictly formalized leaves and flowers bordered above and below by a good broad band of plain surface, and then enriched below, where the hand grasps it, with a chequer or continuous patterning of chevrons done by traced lines from the outside, will look dignified, rich, and workmanlike. Or you may raise a row of largish bosses with the snarling-iron and trace concentric lines round them and powder the surface with small bosses, mere punch marks done from the inside, and encircled from the outside; or you may, with a crescent- shaped punch cut for the purpose, make rings of petals round one t>f these marks as a center — always using as sug- gestion the effects produced naturally by the tools you employ. You will then be the less tempted to follow the vagaries of L' Art Nouveau , that corrupted com- pound of uneasy vermiformity, slickness, and imbecility, from which escape seems almost impossible. It is the art of the undying worm. 6 1 Hammer Work Hammer If it be desired to add a base to the Work beaker, you will take a circle of metal as much greater in radius than the bottom of the cup as you wish the projection of the molding to be. You will then dome it up in the hollowed wood-block to get the rough shape, afterward finishing it with hammers on the stake you used for the cup. Or you may put the dome on pitch and shape it with repousse punches, taking care to avoid too much elaboration. The sim- plest rounds, chamfers, and hollows, with good broad surfaces to catch the light and reflections when polished, are always best. The student must not forget that these suggestions of design are only those which have arisen in my own experience. They are not to be taken as the only possible mean§ of decoration. If the worker has any imagination — few are really without it, for imagination is only active love of beauty whether in Nature or in Art — then he will find the way for himself, his spirit and its mani- festation in his work will be shaped to the thing he loves. A man’s work is the mirror of his mind. The joint between the base and the cup 62 may now be made. The flat center of Hammer the base must be cut away with the saw, Work leaving a broad fillet all round. Let each be well pickled in diluted sulfuric acid, scrape the joins well on the base and on the cup, paint both with borax and water, tie the two together with dips of strong binding-wire so that they can not slip about, and charge the joint with paillons of solder dipped in borax, and solder with the large blowpipe and foot- bellows, taking care to support the cup so that it does not get bent out of shape when hot. See Chapter XI on Soldering. It will now be necessary to replanish the cup on the stake, as the heat will have taken all the stiffness out of the metal. Any refinement of outline can now be given, any roughness about the joint filed clean, and the base made true on the face- plate or upon a piece of plate-glass. The same must be done for the rim. The cup should be pickled again until quite white and frosted looking. It must next be stoned with a piece of Water of Ayr stone to take away the outer film of oxid. Unless this is done you can not get any proper polish or show the real color of the metal. 63 Hammer There is yet another method of making Work a beaker. It is much easier but less workmanlike. Turn up a conical tube of metal and solder the joint carefully, then hammer it out on the beck-iron to any curve you please, always keeping the hammer blows in concentric hori- zontal rings round the cup ; make the base as before, next solder to the base a ring of plain, half-round, or twisted wire the exact size of the bottom of the body of the cup. This steadies the body on the base and makes it easier to tie the two together for the final soldering. The cup can be planished, filed true, and polished as before. In- stead of planishing you may prefer to add bands of zigzags or waves or moldings or a wreath of leaves. If so, fill the cup with melted pitch, taking care to smear the inside with oil or with whitening and water beforehand, and let it cool. Warm the pitch on the block, press the cup mouth downward on the melted sur- face and put a weight on the top until cool, or, what is simpler, you can lay it on a sand-bag, and do without the pitch-block. The first method is how- ever the most secure. Then sketch on 64 the ornament and outline it with a tracer, lightly if you do not want the lines to show inside and firmly if you do. If, for example, you wish to raise a rounded band around the cup near the brim. Trace a line above and below all round the cup, the distance apart being the width of the molding. You will then remove the cup from the pitch - block, warm it slightly in the blowpipe flame, and take out the pitch. Then rewarm the pitch on the block, lay the cup on its side, and press it well into the pitch. The space between the two traced lines can then be beaten out with rounded punches to the projection 5 65 Hammer Work Hammer required. Other projections which may Work be required lower down within the cup must be done with the snarling-iron, Fig. 19. but these should only be very slight, as the cup would be difficult to clean 66 when in use. Then clean, polish, and finish as before. Another kind of joint which may be used in metal jugs or vases, or in any case where the joint does not matter, is the inter- locking joint (see fig. 1 8). Cut out the metal to the shape required, making it \ inch longer than is necessary for a butt joint, giving thus a lap of l inch, and divide each of the edges to be joined into an equal num- ber of spaces not more than \ inch nor less than \ inch ; cut these with the shears a little more than i inch inward and scrape both sides clean. Bend the alternate lappets of metal up and down on each half, fit the two together and solder firmly, flushing the joints thoroughly. The resulting tube or cone can now be hammered into shape and planished almost as if it were in one piece. Hammer Work 67 Hammer Fig. 19 shows a cup on a pillar-like Work base. The cup would be made separately as above described, and the base would be made as if it were a beaker. The raised moldings on the stem (fig. 20) would be done with the snarling-iron and chased up from the front. The grapes and moldings on the cup would all be done from the in- side. The cup and base would then be soldered together as before. In the bottom of the cup you might place a small panel of the vine (fig. 21). Seen through wine a little ornament in a silver cup looks as if done in fine enamel. CHAPTER VIII Candlesticks — The Socket — The Shaft — The Scorer — The Knop — The Base — Fitting Together — Polishing — A Simpler Form of Candlestick Candlesticks First take a disk of silver or copper, 10 gage, 3 inches in, diameter, beat it into 68 Candlesticks Silver Knop. Candlesticks a cup as before described. This is to hold the socket of the candle. Next make the shaft, which may be six-sided and tapering. Take a piece of metal of the same size, and draw upon it one face of the tapering shaft, and then, using each side of this face as one side of the two neighboring faces, mark them out also (fig. 23) with a cutter made out of a file by bending the tang at right angles (fig. 24), the end being sharpened to a chisel point, the edge run- ning lengthwise. Cut down the two inner angles until you have cut half through the metal, bend the sides to their proper angle, and flush the angle with silver solder. Repeat this for the other half of the shaft, and tie and solder the halves together. File up the two visible joins clean and smooth. Now make the boss (fig. 27) out of 10 gage 70 by making a cup, and then drawing the Candlesticks mouth gradually over on the curved stake with the hammer shown in fig. 25. Planish it carefully, and anneal it afterward. Boss out with a snarling-iron a few shallow circular bosses around the knop. Now fill the knop with pitch, and draw on the circular bosses whatever ornament you please. You might, for example, conventionalize the sym- bols of the constellations nearest the North Star. Now make the guard- dish with a circular rais- ing in the center, to form a base for the shaft; beat it up like a flat saucer, planish it, and beat round the edges other circular panels, on which you will place whatever you wish, i.e. symbols of the seven planets as being congruous with the first suggestion. Now make two circles of twisted square wire, 7i Fig. 24. Candlesticks one circle being right, the other left-hand twist, one circle just fitting outside, the other just fitting inside the rim of the guard-dish, and solder them to this edge (fig. 2 6). On the circular raising you will solder a six-sided bearing-plate, and just within the edges of this bearing-plate you will solder a line of strong square twist. The space enclosed must exactly fit the base of the shaft, which will be strengthened by a band of thick metal, surmounted by a ring of twist, and just above the bottom edge a second row of reverse twist arranged to fit exactly over the twist soldered on the plate on the guard-dish. To make the base, take a piece of No. 12, and beat it up into a cup with a fiat bottom and tapering slightly hollow sides. The rim of this cup will of course be the bottom, and the edge should have a broad flat beading 72 raised round it to strengthen it. You may Candlesticks now arrange a few sprays of flowers round this base, and after bossing them out from the back, fill the base with pitch and chase them up from the front. The socket for the candle is a simple cylinder of No. 8, long enough to project at least \ inch above the edge of the smaller cup, and having two rings of twisted wire soldered round the upper edge. You have now to fit the whole together. First cut a hole in the knop (see fig. 27) Fig. 26. large enough to let the hexagonal shaft through to the proper height (see fig. 25) ; file the edges true, and then dome up a shal- low cup of 14 metal to cover the bottom of the knop. Cut a similar hexagonal hole in this, and when it fits the shaft and the knop properly, take them apart, and solder the shallow cup to the knop. Next clean the knop in pickle and slip it into place on the shaft, and turn up a band of metal about \ inch broad to fit the shaft 73 Candlesticks underneath the knop. Solder two rows of Candlesticks square twist with a plain flatted wire be- tween to the upper edge of this band. A similar but smaller band having been fitted to the upper part of the knop, the latter can now be slipped into position and riveted firmly there. You can now fasten this in its place on the shaft with small screws or rivets. Beat out a shallow cup out of 14 copper \ inch deep, and about 1 inch outside diameter. Tap a screw on the end of a piece of J-inch German silver wire about 1 inch longer than the shaft, and on the other end solder the shallow cup you have just beaten out. You will now need to cut plates of thick metal, size 14 or 16, and after drilling a hole the size of the center rod, to fit them inside the top and bottom of the shaft. These plates are to prevent movement when the whole candle- stick is screwed together. You will now need a screw nut and a washer-plate. Fit all the parts carefully together, and screw the nut tight. If there be any movement it means that the bearing surfaces do not fit each other, and the inequalities must be filed away. When everything fits, the whole can be polished with oil and pumice and finished with rotten stone or crocus, 75 Candlesticks but do not remove the hammer marks. When it is all clean put it together finally, and darken the whole surface with a weak solution of sulfid of ammonium in hot water. Then wash it dry, and again polish slightly with a leather and a little rouge, and the work is complete. Another form may be made thus Beat up two deep funnel-shaped cups out of 14 copper, one larger than the other for the base, the smaller one for the top. When the shapes are true, make a shallow saucer-shaped cup a little larger than the top circle, and turn the edges over a stake with an edge to it, or over the edge of a hammer held in the vise. Then fit it on the top and carefully hammer the edge of the saucer down until it grips the edge of the cup. This makes the top of the candlestick. You will now need a boss to cover the meeting of the upper joint and lower portions of the candlestick. This is made either by beating up a deep cup as before described, then, after filling it with pitch, chase a wreath of olive or laurel or vine leaves, drawn carefully from nature, and arranged spirally round the boss, beginning at the bottom. 76 Candlesticks 77 Candlesticks When you have got the relief you can beat down the ground, and after removing the pitch pierce the openings through with a sharp tracer, and then fit it into its place, as described before, and fasten the two together with a central rod and a screw-nut. The candle-socket is beaten up out of a cylinder, its top edge expanded and turned over (see fig. 29), and beaten down carefully into a rim ; a false bottom is next soldered in, and the socket fitted lightly over the cylindrical head of the central shaft as before. Another boss may be made by beating up two cups ; one, a little larger than the other, has its edges 78 spread out and turned over the lip of the Candlesticks smaller bowl, as described for the top of the candlestick. This makes a very simple and sturdy-looking candlestick. CHAPTER IX ( Spoons — The Shape of the Bowl — The Stem — The Handle or Thumbpiece — Joining the Bowl and Handle — Second Method of Making a Spoon — Third Method — Boxwood Punches — The Lead Matrix — Ingots for Handles First take a piece of silver, say io gage, Spoons mark on it the shape of the bowl (fig. 30) — avoid the ugly modern shapes — and beat it out with a boxwood mallet into a suitable hollow in the beating-block. When you have got it nearly into shape, true it up on the rounded stake with a planishing hammer. Then take a piece of -j^g-th square wire or a strip of thick plate a little longer than the handle you propose and thicker, or you may cast a thick taper ingot like a big nail. Then gradually spread the top out wedge-shaped with a hammer on the anvil, annealing the metal from time to time. You may find 79 that as the metal extends it will crack at Spoons the edge, if so file away the crack with a triangular file; this prevents the crack from spreading. When you have spread it out a little more, take a chisel and divide the wedge into parts as shown in the diagram (fig. 31). Anneal it well, and bend the cut portions outward (fig. 32), and hammer them carefully into long taper twigs. When you have done this neatly, anneal the metal again and coil Fig. 3 1 . the twigs up as on fig. 30, or in any symmetrical way you may please. You will now solder the coils to each other, and further strengthen the joins by adding grains or groups of grains at the various points of junction. You will now have to fix the bowl and handle together. Hammer the end of the handle taper, leaving, however, a squarish projection at 6 81 Spoons the very end of the handle. This is to give a broader base for the attachment of the bowl. Unless the end of the handle spreads out over the bowl where it joins, the strain put upon the spoon in polishing will soon tear the bowl and 82 handle apart. When you have tapered the handle nicely, flatten out the square projection fan-wise and file it to fit the bowl. Take a narrow strip of iron about Y^th thick and i^-th wide and tie it firmly to the handle with wire, so that the iron projects beyond the spoon end of the handle by more than the length of the bowl. You can now tie the bowl and handle together with binding-wire and solder the two together. This done planish the bowl upon a rounded stake, both to harden the metal and to correct any al- teration in shape that may have come about in the soldering. Do the same with the handle. The work can now be IG - 33- stoned and polished with pumice and oil, finishing up with rouge. Another way is to cast an ingot of the 83 Spoons Spoons rough shape of the bowl and shank to- gether (see fig. 33). The whole spoon is then shaped up with the hammer and the file, after the ingot has been passed through the rolling-mill once or twice to consoli- date the metal. The objection to this is that it is more wasteful of the metal, but if you preserve the lemel with suf- ficient care, the waste can be almost entirely recovered. Another way of preparing the bowls is to take a good-sized piece of boxwood (fig. 34) and carve it into the shape of the convex side of the bowl. An impression of this is taken in modeling wax, and a plaster cast made from the wax. Trim the plaster-cast into a square block, bend up a piece of thin sheet metal so that it makes an edging almost an inch high above the top surface of the cast (fig. 35). Tie this edging tightly round the cast with binding-wire, and fill up round the edge of the cast with a little thin plaster. Dry the whole near the fire or in an oven until every trace of moisture has disappeared. Over this cast or mold, when it is per- fectly dry, pour melted lead, and you will have a mold of the concave side of the spoon. Place this mold upon the anvil, 84 and a piece of io-gage silver on the mold. With repeated blows on the box- wood punch drive the metal into the mold, annealing as often as may be necessary. You will now have a rough shape of the bowl ; the superfluous metal must be cut away, and the crinkled edges 85 Spoons Spoons hammered out smooth upon a rounded stake with a small tapping-hammer. A good deal of hammer work in the preparation of the handle can be avoided by making the ingot more nearly the shape and size of the finished work. It can be flattened, and the end thinned out Fig. 35. in the rolling-mill. The finishing can be done with the hammer on the stake as before. Do not be afraid of leaving the hammer marks where they are seen to have been necessary to produce the shape ; they will always look beautiful. But the modern vice of putting in hammer marks to make a bad form look well, is more than reprehensible — it is foolish. 86 CHAPTER X Silver Solder — Use of Scrap Silver — The Crucible— The Ingot Mold — Enameling Solder — Solders for Large Work — How to Make Ingot Molds It is best always to make your own solder. It will help to use up small scrap silver, to buy. Silver Solder 87 Silver For ordinary work take two parts of Solder silver cuttings and one part of fine brass cut small, and put them in a small fire- clay crucible (fig. 36) with a little borax. Place the crucible carefully in the coke on the furnace, and put more coke round Fig. 37. it, leaving an opening in front and on the top. Then with the gas blowpipe and foot-bellows direct the flame on the crucible, gradually increasing the force of the blast until the metal is fused. Care must be taken not to give more heat than 88 is absolutely necessary, or the zinc in the brass will be oxidized, and the subsequent fusibility of the solder impaired. Have ready an ingot mold (fig. 37 ) well greased ; pour the fluid metal into the mold, and leave to cool. When cool you can roll it through the metal rollers down to size 6 metal gage, or thinner if you want it for very small work. If fine brass can not be obtained, fine spelter or good pins will do equally well. A very hard solder for use in enameling is made as follows : oz. dwt. grs. Fine silver 1 o o Alloy copper .0 5 o 1 5 °. For a large piece of work requiring many solderings the successive solderings may be safely done by using a more fusible solder for each operation. The range of solder may be as fol- lows : No. 1 . 7 parts fine silver to 1 of fine brass. 33 2. 5 >> >> 1 >3 33 33 3- 3 I 33 33 33 4- 1 >> >> 33 I 33 >3 89 Silver Solder Silver Solder It is, however, rarely necessary to use so much precaution ; care in the arrange- ment of the joints and in the regulation of the flame will make it possible to do with only one solder. How to Make Ingot Molds .— If you have not got an ingot mold one can easily be made. Take a Fig. piece of square iron wire, bend it up into the shape of a long U (fig. 3 8), file the edges true, and on one side of the U file cross nicks with a 3 -square file. These nicks al- low the air to escape when the metal is be- ■ ing poured in. 3 8, Then take two pieces of thick sheet iron a little larger than the U, and place one on each side of the U, and tie the whole to- gether with binding- wire. Ingots of 9 ° Silver Solder Fig. 39. 9 1 Silver any size can be made by varying the Solder thickness and contour of the iron en- closing wire. By using narrow ingots you can cast slips of metal which can be afterward drawn down into wire through a draw- plate fixed in a vise (see chapter on Wire-Drawing). You will need broad ingots if you wish to roll plate, narrow ingots for wire. Several forms of ingot are given in the diagram (fig. 39, A, B, and C). CHAPTER XI Soldering — Use of Borax — The Blowpipe — Soldering Lamps Soldering The art of soldering with the fusible alloys given above is one which is much writ- ten about and but very rarely described, although the process itself is exceedingly simple. It demands only care and scrupu- lous cleanliness of all the materials. The parts of the metal to be joined must be abso- lutely clean — that is, scraped bright ; the solder itself must be clean also. First, take a lump of borax crystal ; grind up a little with water on a small piece of slate. Take 92 a slip of solder, cut a number of slits Soldering lengthwise down one end, and then, by a few cross-cuts, snip off a number of tiny bits or panels of solder. These panels are then dipped in the borax, so that they are completely covered by a thin coating of borax. Next, the pieces of metal hav- ing been scraped clean along the join, are both painted over with a solution of borax by means of a camehs-hair brush. The pieces are now to be tied together in their proper positions by binding-wire. Care must be taken here not to bring the edges of the metal too closely together, or else the solder when fused will run along the angle instead of entering the joint. When this happens the work looks as if it were perfectly soldered, but on filing or putting any strain on it the joint immediately falls to pieces. It is therefore important for silver soldering that the work should be fitted closely, but not too closely. Enough space should be left for the metal to run along the joint by capillary attraction. When the two pieces of metal are fitted, and bound together as described with iron binding-wire, the joint is then moistened with a brush charged with borax solution ; 93 Soldering the little chips of solder are then placed at intervals fairly closely along the joint. The work is then gently warmed in the flame of a blowpipe to drive off the water in the borax. When this is dry a stronger flame is directed over the whole work, heating it gradually and evenly, taking care that no part of the metal except that near the joins gets red hot. When the join has got thoroughly well heated, a 94 brisker flame may now be directed upon Soldering the bits of solder. When using the blow- pipe be very careful always to direct the flame toward the worker and downward, so that he may readily see the heat he is giving and the heat the work requires. If the work has been brought up to the proper heat, the solder will immediately flush and run along the joint, filling it in every part. Wherever a portion of the metal has been allowed to grow cooler 95 Soldering tlian the surrounding parts, the joint there will be imperfect, and the work must be cooled, the metal cleaned by being dipped into pickle — which is a mixture of one part hydrochloric acid and ten parts water ; a stronger solution much used is half and half of each — and then the operation begun again until all the joints are full. Soldering can be done either with the gas flame and mouth blowpipe, with the foot-bellows and hand blowpipe, with an oil lamp or a spirit lamp, or, as almost all old work was done, on a charcoal fire, with fans and small bellows. The spirit lamp (fig. 40A) and the oil lamp (fig. 40B), with the mouth blowpipe (fig. 40c), generally are only suitable for small work, as the amount of heat required for work of any size is very great. But a very great deal of work can be done with the spirit or oil lamp. Both are very easy to manage, only in the case of the oil lamp more care is needed to keep a good flame and to avoid smoking the work. It is most important to acquire freedom in the use of the blowpipe, and to this end the student should practise with two sizes of blowpipe — one for large and one for small work. CHAPTER XII Settings — The Kinds of Stones to use — Close Settings — Setting the Stone — Open Settings — Paved Settings In choosing stones to set, avoid those that are cut into facets. Select those that are rounded or cabochon cut ; if you can do so, use stones that are cut by Eastern lapidaries. The Oriental has an eye for color and form, and has no foolish fears of so-called flaws. The stones rejected by the jeweler are almost always well worth the attention of the artist. See that those you buy have a fairly level bed for the setting, and that the stone is well beveled, so that the setting will hold 7 97 Soldering Settings Settings when it is rubbed over. Settings may be open or closed. The closed setting is a box, the upper edge of which is rubbed over the stone. The open setting may be a mere rim without a bottom, or a circlet of claws. Or the two may be combined, and a close setting set in a large open-work setting of branches and leaves, as in early French or German work. In incrusted work the stones are let into recesses carved out below the surface of the metal. The edges of the opening are then drawn up to the stone by careful work with punch and burnishers. This method is common in Indian and Persian work. To Make a Close Setting . — Gut a band of silver, size 5 or 6 metal gage, somewhat wider than the intendedheight of the setting, to allow for filing level and rubbing over, bend the strip round so that it fits closely over the stone (fig. 41). When you have fitted the band closely to the contour of the stone, cut off the superfluous metal, file the juxtaposed 98 1 — ~~ t mi v Fig. ends true, tie the setting round with fine Settings binding-wire so that the ends meet (fig. 4 1 a) ; take the borax brush and paint the joint, cut a paillon of solder, dip it in the borax, and lay it on the joint. Then put the setting thus charged on the wire mop or on a piece of charcoal, warm it in the flame, and when the borax has ceased boiling direct Fig. 4 i a. Fig. 42. the tip of the blue flame on the joint and the setting. The solder should run almost immediately. If it has flushed 99 Settings the joint, the setting may be cooled and made true by tapping it round with a light hammer on a taper steel mandrel (fig. 42) — an old steel cotton-spindle makes an excellent mandrel- — and the bottom edge filed fiat. Then take a piece of silver, 6 or 8, according to the use to which you intend to put the setting, and a little larger all round than it, scrape the surface clean, tie the setting on with binding-wire (fig. 43), and anoint the surfaces to be joined as before, and set a few paillons round the joint and proceed as before. When the joint is complete, file off the superfluous metal, and you will have a box which just takes the stone. This, if the work is properly done, gives the simplest form of setting. If desired, a bearing for the stone can be made by fitting a concentric but narrower band inside this. The stone is now supported all round, and the work of rubbing over is made much easier. The edges of the setting are then filed true, the superfluous metal at the base cut away, and the whole made clean and workmanlike. Settings 100 Fig. 43. can be grouped together and united by filigree-work to form brooches, clasps, necklaces ; but this will be described in a later chapter. Open settings, collets, or crown settings, are made by taking a strip of thick metal (io gage), bending it a little smaller than the stone, and soldering as before,, Then take a sharp graving-tool, wet the point, and cut away the metal inside the top edge so as to leave the ledge about a six- teenth down in which the stone must fit (fig. 44). Then take a small file and form the setting into leaves or claws, or what- ever you wish, taking care first to block out the main forms, always remembering to leave enough metal at the top to hold the stone. The outer surface of the claws, or leaves may be carved with the round gravers to whatever shape is desired (fig. 45). Or the drill may be used to produce 101 Settings / Settings perforated patterns below the line of the base of the stone ; in fact, there is no end to the variety of forms which may be pro- Fig. 45. duced in this way. The main thing is to secure the stone firmly in its place ; unless this is done in the first shaping of the setting, it can not be done properly after- ward. Paved Settings . — These are settings scorpered out of the solid metal. The method is one which has been much abused, but is yet capable of much beauty when properly applied. The outline of the stone is marked on the plate, the ground is then carefully cut away with the scorper until the stone just fits in its place (fig. 46). You then cut a border round the stone, sloping away out- 102 Fig. 46. ward as wide as you wish, keeping this Settings border highest next the stone. When the remainder of the work is finished, cleaned, and stoned and polished, the gem is put in its place, and held there while the metal is burnished up against it (fig. 47). This work requires great care and patience, for if not properly done the stone will ouickly become loose. This method can only be applied to the harder Fig. 49. stones. Figs. 48 and 49 show a paved setting used in the center of a ring, with tiny pierced fleurs-de-lis in the angles. Fig. 48. Fig. 47. 103 CHAPTER XIII Rings — Hoop Rings — Making Compound Wire — The Knot Ring — Polishing — The Wreath — The Filigree Table Ring — Another Form — The Carved Ring — The Design of Rings The simplest form is a hoop of flat- tened wire or a band of metal coiled round a mandrel and soldered. This is the foundation of more elaborate forms. A pleasant-looking ring may be made as follows. Take a piece of half-round Fig. 50. silver wire about -jigth inch wide, solder two fine wires lengthwise down each side of it, then weave this into a knot leaving an opening in the center (fig. 50). At every one of the crossings of the knot solder a tiny bead of silver made by 104 cutting off snippets of metal and running them up into beads on a piece of char- coal ; then take a small stone, a garnet or an opal or a chrysoprase, and set it in a close setting. Fit the setting inside the opening in the knot (fig. 51), and solder it there, taking care to leave room for rubbing the setting over the stone. Then make the band of the same com- pound wire, and solder two V-shaped bands to it as wide apart as the width of the knot ; then solder the knot in between these, ar- ranging the arms of the V’s so that they run in with the lines of the knots ; cover the joints with beads, either single or grouped three, four, or five to- gether, or with single beads flattened out on the stake, then pickle the ring, stone it with small bits of Water of Ayr stone, or slips of slate, or with pointed slips of boxwood dipped in pumice powder and oil. Then polish it on the lathe with the scratch brush, and after setting the stone finish on the buff with rouge. You can vary this pattern to almost 10 5 Rings any extent by using different sections of wire and different arrangements of the knots and beads; e.g., the central wire instead of being round can be flat with hollow notches filed out of each side be- fore the side wires are soldered to it. The knot can be made more complete by inter- lacing thinner wires in and out of the others, or you can add twigs and leaves in the interspaces. To Make Leaves . — Take a wire of the thickness you require the twig to be, heat the end in the blowpipe flame, plunge it in the borax, then direct the blue flame on the tip. The wire will quickly melt and run up into a bead (fig. 52). As soon as the bead forms, plunge the wire into water, and after flattening on the stake you can file it into whatever shape you please. Groups 106 of three or five of these soldered together Rings and the leaves joined at the tips by tiny beads look very well (fig. 52) when com- bined with knot work of flat wire. Another form of ring is the filigree table ring (fig. 53). Take any small irregular stone and make a setting. Take filigree wire, or fine twistedwireflattened in the rollers (see fig. 55) will do as well, twist up the wire in- to a simple wreathed symmetrical pattern. Then take a piece of modeling wax — - not modeling paste, that corrodes the silver — fix the set- ting upright in it and arrange the wire wreath round it. Have ready some flattened beads, group them into simple patterns with the wreath (see fig.), and press ever so lightly into the wax. (Fig. 54 shows another form of table filigree with a pearl center.) Then mix a small quantity of fine plaster of Paris and place a good body of it over the whole group ; leave it to set and when 107 Rings quite dry and hard remove the wax care- fully. The silver will be found fixed in the plaster. Remove the plaster with a brush from between the joints and around the setting, but do this without disturbing the pattern in any way. Dry the plaster thoroughly in an oven or by the fire, then paint borax on the setting and over the cross- ings of the wire, and everywhere you wish to solder. Put pail- lons in the necessary places and play the flame over the whole gradually so that any chance moisture may be driven off. If this is done too suddenly the plaster may fly into pieces. You will then direct the flame on the setting and the wreath until the solder has run everywhere. Then turn up a ring out of a strip of silver and solder it. Take a coil of wire twisted from right to left and another twisted fro’m left to right and a length of plain wire a size or two larger. Boil out the band in dilute acid, 108 Fig. 54. coil the plain wire round the middle of the band and solder it, coil the twisted wires on either side of it and solder them, using very small paillons of solder, as if much is used the coils of twist will be filled up. When the bare ring is finished thus far, boil it out, clean it in a little pickle, also the setting and the filigree. Take a piece of flatted wire — twisted wire or ordinary round wire passed once or twice through the rollers (fig. 55) — and bend it to the outline of the table of filigree, and after tying it on with fine wire, solder it to the edge to give strength. Fig . Then tie this table to the ring with wire and solder the two together, and arrange branch pieces of flatted wire or double rows of twist wire, so as to strengthen the junction of the ring with the table (fig. 53). These branch pieces will go from side to side of the ring behind the filigree, and their junction with the ring should be covered with a shield cut out of thin metal, or a flatted bead, or a knot of twist wire, or a group of grains like a flower. The main thing is that the joint must be covered. 109 Rings Rings The junction of the branch pieces with the table of filigree will then be strengthened by round grains soldered in. It is im- portant to remember in all ring designs that there must be no spiky projections ; all must be rounded and smooth, and pleasant to the touch. As the field for the display of workmanship is only the upper area of the first joint of the finger, all ornament should be confined mainly to that space. Many things look well in a sketch which look ridiculous on the finger. It is best there- fore to build Fig - up the effect on the ring itself, using a little hard wax to hold the pieces of silver and whatever stones you may use together. You will soon find out what effect is best if you remember that every design must have three principal features — the ring proper, the junction, and the bezel. Many old rings were carved out of the solid metal (fig. 56). To make a ring of this kind, you will first cast an ingot of the shape you require (fig. 57), or hammer a cast bar into the rough form ; 1 10 then anneal the metal, and put it on the pitch. Then sketch on the design in black water-color with a brush, and have ready a few chisels of various sizes made by sharpening a few tracers on an oilstone. Outline the ornament or the figure with a small round-edged tracing-tool, and afterward cut away the groundwork with a rounded chisel. Then, with ordinary chasing tools, you can model the surface of the leaves and twigs or the figure as much as you please. Remember always to have a bit of the natural foliage near you as a guide ; never do anything in the way of ornament without reference to nature or without having made a careful detailed study of the plant or form you intend to use. You will have quite enough to do to overcome the technical difficulties without having also to puzzle your head over the form. This is a rule which should never be neglected ; you must learn the form before in Rings Rings you can use it. Avoid sprawling lines ; let leaves and twigs be well knit together, let all the lines lead the eye to some central point. You must not imitate but translate. All art is translation from one state into another, and the manner of the translation reveals the quality of the artist. When you have modeled the wreath or the knot as much as you wish, you can then carve the remainder of the band with a running wreath or a chevron, or with a graver hollow out symmetrical cuts all round the band. File and scrape the in- side smooth ; polish with a ringstick, which is a taper rod of wood covered with chamois leather, and charged with rouge. CHAPTER XIV Necklaces — How Designed — The Arrangement of Stones — Chain-making — Filigree Mounts for Pearls — -Backing the Pearls — Woven Links — The Snap — Polishing — Another Form of Neck- lace — What to Study — How to Use your Studies — Pendants — Suggestions for Design — Loop for the Pendant — Cleaning and Polishing Necklaces Necklaces should be designed on a circle of 4^-in. diameter, and all pendants should I 12 be arranged on radial lines. No pendants Necklaces should go beyond the semicircle or they will hang awkwardly on the shoulder when worn. Cut a circle out of thin copper or brass \\ in. in diameter. Have ready the stones you desire to use, and some flattened wire or rolled twist. Make a few flattened beads, and then sketch out the design which suggests itself when you have ar- ranged the stones according to their pre- ciousness and color. You will find that the mere symmetrical arrangement of the stones round the circle will suggest almost instantly any number of methods of treat- ment. Choose what seems the simplest, and twist up your wire to form knots or wreaths round the stones (fig. 58), and then arrange for the chains and loops which will be needed to link all up to- gether. Avoid the use of shop-made chains ; they spoil the effect of the most carefully devised necklace. The only chain possible to use is that called Venetian chain, but even that is not quite satisfactory. The way to secure a good effect of chain-work is to coil up the links yourself. This is. best done by taking a piece of flattened 8 1 13 Necklaces 114 Fig. 58. wire, oblong in section, with the edges Necklaces rounded off with the file. This is to serve as the mandrel, and its size is regu- lated by the size of the links you desire. Wrap a strip of thin paper spirally round the mandrel, and secure it at each end with a few turns of binding-wire. Then take the wire, which may be simple or compound as described for rings, and fix the mandrel Fig. 59. in a bench vise if the wire to be coiled is thick, or in a hand-vise if it be thin. Coil the wire spirally round the mandrel very closely and regularly until you have used as much wire as you require (fig. 59). Heat the whole with the blowpipe on the mop until the paper is charred away. You can now withdraw the mandrel from the coil, which would be impossible were Necklaces the paper not used. With a jeweler’s fret- saw cut off the links lengthwise down the spiral, keeping this cut as clean as possible. You can then coil on another mandrel of different, e.g. circular, section and slightly larger, another kind of wire, simple or compound, as may be necessary Fig. 6o. to give contrast to the first series, and saw these apart in like manner. You will then loop the two together in such lengths as you may need for connecting the various features of the necklace (fig. 62) ; and you must solder each link separately on the mop, taking care by 1 16 using a small blowpipe and a small flame Necklaces to confine the heat to the link you are soldering. A pleasant effect can be produced by setting rough pearls or stones in a background of wire filigree (see fig. 60) or wreath -work of leaves Fig. 6i. and twigs (figs. 61 and 6 1 a). It must be made as follows:- — Take the stones you have selected, make either close or open settings, whichever you prefer, and set them round the metal circle. If you choose rough pearls or pearl blisters, take small pieces of silver, size 5 or 6, and dome them up with a rounded doming-punch, either on the lead-block or on the doming-block, to fit the backs of the pearls. I f the pearls are ir- regular in shape, you must p i shape the metal backs with rounded punches on lead. Having fitted each pearl with a back, you can either file away the back until it can hardly be seen from the front, 117 Necklaces or you can keep the edge well to the front and file it into symmetrical shapes, or you can border it with twisted wire or Fig. 62. with wire bent into a rippled shape (see fig. 63) and soldered. Having made the backs for the pearls or the settings for the stones, arrange them round the metal circle- — naturally keeping the best and largest stone or pearl for the center. Bend up some flattened wire into woven knots, as shown in the diagram, and solder the cups or settings on the wreath. Then make long interwoven loops of wire with circles or squares or groups of beads sol- dered at the crossings (fig. 64). This is not only to strengthen the work, but to give the necessary con- trast of broad, simple sur- faces, with the wreathing lines of the loops and back- grounds of the stones or pearls. Then make oval links, as described above, and loop the links all together. 118 You will need a pendant for the center. Necklaces This can either be made out of a group of pearls or stones with a tiny panel of repousse or enamel in the center, or it may be a small group of figure-work, if the student is advanced enough to do this. You will now make the chain. This should consist of links, repeating the forms of the links in the central portion ; these will afterward be joined together by small subsidiary links. A very pretty Fig. 64. link is made with groups of grains or beads soldered on both sides of the link (see fig. 66). These, alternately with loops coiled up out of flattened wire, look very sparkling and pleasant when polished. These grained loops must be so arranged that the points are not likely to stick into the skin or to scratch when the necklace is worn. They must all lie flat, and the connecting loops must be smooth. The catch must next be made. Take a piece ll 9 Necklaces of brass wire 4 or 5 inches long, oblong in Fig. 65. 120 section -g- in. broad, file the angles until it is nearly oval in section, or you may pass a piece of round wire through the rolling-mill. This is to serve as the mandrel (fig. 65). Bend a slip of No. 5 metal \ inch wide, so that it fits round the mandrel closely, and solder the join. On one end you will solder a bit of the same size metal and a ring on the center of this ; at the other end you will file a notch half-way across the tube, and in this notch solder a nar- row strip of silver, leaving a slot be- tween the tube and the edge of the strip ; this is to take the Necklaces tongue of the catch. In the center of the strip you will file out a notch dividing it entirely, and also the end of the tube for about 4 -th of an inch. Then take a slip of silver as wide as the tube and half as thick, solder a plate of No. 5 metal at right angles on the end, then take another slip the same width as the first, and solder the two together at the opposite end to the right-angled plate. This is the tongue of the catch, and you must leave a space between the end plate and the end of this last slip or tongue, so that when it is pushed into its place the tongue may spring up and catch behind the slotted end plate of the body of the catch. A tiny slip of silver is now prepared which will just fit in the slot already filed in the body of the snap ; this must be soldered on the end of the tongue. Now try if it will fit the catch, and if not, file the sides of the slot neatly and truly until the tongue slips in quite easily and springs up and holds the catch in its place and does not wriggle about. You will then file it up true and clean when, having linked one part on each end of the necklace and soldered the joins the whole is complete. 121 Necklaces You will then boil out the whole necklace in dilute acid until it comes out quite white. Afterward polish the silver-work with the scratch-brush 5 using a little stale beer as a lubricant. Next wash it out in warm water, set the stones, and rub the settings over with the burnisher. At the same time you may burnish bits of the orna- ment, the loops, and particularly the flat- tened beads. Then repolish the whole with rouge to a brilliant surface. You may wish to make a necklace en- tirely of silver. We will suppose it is to be a garland of roses. Now, for metal-work, it is important that all the natural forms you employ should be generalized ; that is to say, while you can not study too closely the method of growth and the characteristic shapes of the leaves, buds, flowers, and fruit, you must avoid slavish imitation of acci- dental forms or the minute details of the growth. In your studies be as minute as . you please, you can not be too painstaking ; put in everything you see. But when you translate these studies into work, learn to leave out. The artist is known as much by what he omits as by what he puts in his work. He seeks forms typical of his subject and yet suitable to his material. 122 Now, for our immediate purpose a rose- bush is an assemblage of more or less sym- metrically arranged masses of leaves, each leaf being a symmetrical group of five subsidiary leaves. Relieved against this mass of leaves we have large and small bossy forms, the roses and the buds. For our necklace the simplest way is to arrange the rose boughs in a series of panels of pierced repousse, alter- nately square and round- ish (figs. 66 and 67), the panels afterward con- nected by loops andbeads. In these panels the roses and buds will be in high relief, the leaves and branches in lower and flatter relief, so that when the whole is polished the roses and buds will shine out brilliantly as jewels. Take your circle, as before, and lay it on a bit of paper or on a sheet of wax rolled out. See how large you can make the panels, and how many you may require. Take a piece of silver, size 8, and outline the shapes of the panels, and sketch on it the main branches and mark the position of the 123 Necklaces Necklaces bosses of roses. Lay the metal face down on a thick piece of cork or cork-matting and punch out these roses from the back, and then punch out the smaller group of buds, distributing them carefully so as to get a sparkling effect. Then, after heating the pitch, lay the metal down after oiling the under surface. You will now outline the leaves and branches, keeping the arrangement as symmetrical and as simple as possible. Avoid curly leaves, coiling branches, wormlike roots, and squirming forms. Keep the drawing of the leaves clear and accurate and decided. When you have done this, then out- line the roses and draw the petals on the bosses, either open or partly closed. Then with a sharp tracer outline the spaces to be pierced, which will probably be the whole of the ground, and then when you have done all you can to the repousse, take the silver off the pitch, clean it and pickle it. Then lay each panel on its face and file away the ridges made by the outlining tracer, and soon the tiny 124 scraps of the ground will drop out and Necklaces the ornament will show clear against the light. Next take a piece of silver for the back of the panel, size 4 or 5, a little larger all round than your panel, dome it up very slightly so that it may press against the backs of the twigs and leaves. When it fits scrape the surface all over and tie the two securely together ; use plenty of borax between the ioints, tack the back and front together in two or three places round the edge and in the center. When the solder has run, press the joints closely to- gether wherever the metal has been warped by the heat, or wherever the joint may have been imperfectly fitted or secured. Then clean the whole in acid and recharge with borax and with enough but not too much solder, and see that the solder flushes well under and into all the joins. You can then pierce the ground out with a drill and fret-saw. Do not saw too closely to the ornament, leave a narrow fillet to be filed away afterward, and before cut- ting away the waste metal round the edge coil up some rings out of 14 wire and solder them on the back plate in con- tact with the panel where they are re- quired. If these rings are simply soldered 125 Necklaces against the panel they are apt to pull off after a certain amount of wear. To loop these panels up together, you will require loops or links which carry out the design of the main panels. These may be either roses with a few leaves, or boughs twined up into closely knit bosses. When the circlet is completed, you will make the catch, and the whole, after pick- ling, will be ready to be stoned and polished. If you wish to make a pendant for this necklace, it must not merely be an elaborated panel, but should have somecentralpoint of interest. You may either read “ The Romaunt of the Rose ” and take thence what- ever suggestion most appeals to you, or you may prefer to put a nightingale singing in the middle of a bower of leaves (fig. 68). The latter will be the least difficult, as the former supposes a knowledge of the figure, 126 though you might make a little gateway with towers to the garde*n of the Rose, which could be made very interesting. To Make the Nightingale . — First go and watch one singing. There are happily numberless woods and copses near London in which the nightingale may be heard and seen at almost any time of the day. Take an opera-glass and find the spot most fre- quented by the birds and least frequented by humans ; sit motionless and watch them while they sing. If you have not seen one before, you will never forget the first sight of the little brown-backed, gray- breasted bird against the sky and leaves, with head thrown back and his throat throbbing in an ecstasy of song. Make as many sketches as you can, and when you get home take a piece of silver, size 8 — of fine silver if you are going to enamel, or standard if left from the tool, and it must be a good deal larger than the size you propose to make the bird — anneal it, sketch the outline the reverse way, and with a rounded doming-punch boss out the metal as much as you can on the cork pad. Then fasten the same domed punch in the vise, and after again annealing, take a boxwood or horn mallet and beat 127 Necklaces Necklaces the metal still further round, until the rough relief is "'as high as the thickness through the body of the bird. Reanneal the metal, lay it on the pitch, and shape the bird carefully with chasing and re- pousse tools, driving the metal gradually round behind the back of the bird, taking care that you do not crack it in the proc- ess. You will find it possible to get the body quite in the round save for a narrow opening at the back. When you have modeled the surface as you wish, cut away the ground and solder a piece of metal over the opening, taking care, if there be no other escape for the air, to drill a small hole where it will least be seen. Then you will take another piece of metal, size 6, or a little less, and make the bower of leaves or branches within which the bird is to be set. You must keep it wreath-like and clear and simple in outline without any spikiness or too great irregularity of surface. It should be made double, the pattern on the back being developed from that on the face. The two can then be filed and fitted to- gether, and pickled and soldered. When the wreath is complete you can tie the bird in its place and solder it to the 128 bough you have prepared for it. When Necklaces the work is clean you can then take a rounded graver and a cement-stick, and after fastening the bird and wreath on the wax, you can sharpen up the modeling of the leaves, cut away superfluous solder, and make the whole clean and workmanlike. The wreath can be hung to the necklace by one or two chains or loops. You will probably find that six loops of flat wire enriched with twist soldered round alternate links, with a rose boss in the center of the six links, will be sufficient (fig. 69). The loops must be fairly broad and not too long, or the pendant will twist about and will not hang truly. Then loop the whole necklace temporarily together to see the effect. It should hang in one even curve, and any irregularity must be corrected by lengthen- ing or shortening links wherever necessary. You will probably find that a second drop or subordinate pendant is needed beneath the bird. Make a pear-shaped group of leaves and roses in two halves (fig. 70), 9 129 Necklaces solder them together with a loop at the top, and hang this by means of three or five links to the wreath. When it all seems as complete as you can make it, put it all in the pickle and leave it till quite white and clean. Stone it carefully and polish on the lathe with the scratch-brush and stale beer. Then wash clean with soap- suds and hot water, and dry it in the sawdust. It will look staring Fig - 7°- and unpleasantly white and bright. This defect can be removed by brushing it over with a hot solution of ammonia sul- fid in water. Take care that it does not get into the setting or the effect of the stone may be entirely spoilt. When the surface gets as dark as you wish, wash it clean in hot water, and polish it by hand with a wash-leather and a little rouge. CHAPTER XV Brooches — Suggestions for Design — Mounting — The Making of Compound Twists — The Joint and Catch Brooches Brooches should be kept rather small, and be designed on the same principles as 130 pendants. The back, however, should al- ways be smooth, and if possible somewhat concave. We will suppose you have a moonstone which you wish to set. Choose some poetical subject suggested by the stone. If I were doing it I should prob- ably reason in this way “ The moon- stone suggests Diana. Her symbol is a stag. The subject shall be a running stag bearing the moon in his antlers.” But this is only one way of looking at the sub- ject ; the student must choose his own. What is personal to one may be an affecta- tion in another, and affected art is bad art. Suppose, however, that you choose to do a stag. Make a drawing of a stag running, or standing sidewise with his head thrown back or turned toward the spectator. We will suppose you make him stand- ing with his head and antlers thrown back. You can either set the stone behind the antlers, like a moon rising behind trees, or you can use the antlers as part of a setting. Having made the drawing of the stag as you wish, take a piece of silver of suitable size and gage, 8 or io if for high relief, 6 or 7 if for lower re- lief. Fit your design within some simple set form, a circle, an oval, or square, and I 3 I Brooches Brooches beat the stag out in relief. Make the setting for the stone and fit it into its place carefully, and if the stone is to be set in the background, arrange the horns so that they will take the setting of the stone, and see that the stone is placed nicely in relation to the rest of the enclosing space. When the repousse is done, boil it clean, and if the ground is to be pierced, make a back as described for the silver necklace. If it is not pierced, dome slightly a piece of No. 5 silver sufficiently large to leave a J-inch margin all round. After the back and front are tacked to- gether, drill a couple of small holes, one at each end of the horizontal diameter a little within the places for the joint and catch. This is to let the air escape, other- wise the imprisoned air expands, and either bursts the back off, or distorts the front by bulging it out in its weakest place. You will now require a border. Take a round wire, size 12, pass it through the flattening-roller or hammer it into a rib- bon, or draw a piece of round wire through a draw-plate with oblong holes. Take a length of smaller wire, about 4 in the metal gage, double it and twist up tightly from right to left ; twist another piece 132 from left to right. Take two lengths of Brooches copper wire, the size of the silver wire be- fore it was flattened, and tie one on each side of the silver ribbon with iron binding- wire. Then fix one end of this compound wire in the vise and one end in a hand- vise or a pair of slides, and twist the whole until the spiral is as close as you wish it. You can then remove the copper wires and replace with the silver twists, and after tying them in their place, you can solder them here and there, using small paillons and taking care not to fill up the twists with solder. Now boil, clean, and solder it round your panel as a frame. Instead of doing this you can make a circle of small stars, either in repousse round the panel, or you can make a number of groups of grains and solder them round. The latter has the more sparkling effect, but it takes much longer to do. When the border is made, file the surplus metal from the back and round the edge, and it will be ready to receive the joint or catch. Take a piece of thick, half-round wire and bend it into the shape of a C with a long tail (CL) ; then file the bottom of the tail fiat, and afterward solder it in position on the brooch near, 133 Brooches but not actually on the edge. Next you must make the hinge for the pin. Take a piece of fine tube, about size 12 in the metal gage, and solder a short length, about -fth inch long, on a slip of No. 5, a little larger each way (fig. 71). Then take a piece of stout silver wire and run the end up into a good-sized bead (fig. 72). Flatten the bead and file it into shape as shown. Upon the flat side of this you will solder another and shorter length of tube (fig. 73). File out of the center of the first Fig. 7 Fig. 72. tube a space wide enough to take the tube on the end of the pin (see fig. 73A). When the two fit perfectly, take another piece of No. 5 and solder it at one side 134 of the bottom joint (see fig. 73A) so that Brooches the two lengths of tube are in the angle Fig, 73. of an L. The last piece helps to make the spring of the pin. The flat end of the pin catches against this : the pin being bent down under the catch is held in place by the elas- ticity of the metal 74). Pins : of 9-carat gold are very much better than silver pins, they are harder, and have more spring in them. The joint, when filed up true and clean, can be sol- dered in place. The whole can now be boiled out and scratch-brushed, and the stone set. If you have a close setting, it is best to l 3S Fig. 74. Fig. 73A. Brooches back the stone with a piece of white foil to give it greater brilliancy. Another way of setting stones in the background of any panel is to beat out a hollow from the back into which the stone exactly fits. You will then pierce out all of this except a narrow piece just sufficient to retain the stone firmly. You will then turn up Fig. 75. a narrow setting of thin silver and file the edge either wavy or scalloped or ser- rated, and solder it in behind as shown (fig. 75). This forms a subsidiary setting, 136 and when all is complete the stone can be dropped into its place and a piece of round wire, bent to the curve of the setting, can then be fitted in behind the stone, and the wavy, scalloped, or serrated edges of the setting bent over the wire and burnished until the stone is set quite firmly. The advantage of this is, that the work on the background can be carried round the set- ting without any of the awkward joins which are almost impossible to avoid when a separate setting is soldered in or upon the ground. At the same time you must not make the work look as if a hole had been made in the metal and a stone dropped casually in. The setting must be frankly made to look like a setting, and the foliage or branches in the background must be made to lead up to the setting as the cul- minating point of the whole jewel. CHAPTER XVI Pendants — Things to be Avoided — Suggestions for De- sign — The Use of Enamel — Setting the Enamel — The Hoop for the Pendant — Polishing Pendants should not be large or sprawl- ing. Points, projections, and roughnesses should be avoided. The lines of the 137 Brooches Pendants Pendants ornament should tend toward the center or to some point of interest within the outline. The back should be made in- teresting as well as the front. My method of design is to make each jewel enshrine some story or symbol. I try to make the ornament allusive to the gem, to its leg- endary history, to its qualities, or to the ideas suggested by it. For example, you take an aqua-marine ; the name itself, no less than the color, at once suggests things of the sea. Any other method is permis- sible if the student is sincere. H e must follow whatever inspiration is given him at all costs, and in spite of everything. The design now suggested is merely a peg on which to hang the technical description. Lay your stone or stones on a bit of silver, and draw fishes swimming spirally to or from the stone as a center ; make studies of fish, avoiding grotesque or extraordinary forms ; pay great attention to the bony structure of the head and the set of the fins. Look at any Japanese drawings of fish you can get hold of, and follow their methods. After you have made the setting for the stone, draw the fish on the silver, boss the whole well out from the back, arrange a 138 hollow for the setting of the stone and fairly deep hollows between the fish to be filled with enamel, and let the outlines of the fish be fairly undercut to give good hold for the enamel. Put a range of spiral curls rather high in relief all round to make a frame, and let the tip of the spirals lip over the bodies of the fish so that they are encircled by waves (fig. 76). When the repousse is finished, you must arrange for the back. You can have it all in enamel like a sea or you can put a silver ship with sails on enamel waves. A modern sailing ship is still as beauti- ful a thing as men make nowadays, and you should make a careful drawing of one. Take care that it fills the panel well, and raise it and chase it until it is as complete as you can make it. If you intend to put an enamel sea, you must prepare a sunken ground wherever l 39 Pendants Pendants the enamel is to come, and the edges of the ground must be undercut, so that the silver itself frames the enamel. Nothing looks worse than enamel melting away into modeled work without a line to frame it and keep it in its proper place in the com- position. Enamel is not a kind of paint which can be applied anywhere as a means of hiding inferior work ; it must be treated as a precious material, and employed in small quantities. The modern tendency to cover large surface with enamel vulgarizes the material, making it look like so much colored varnish, and this without any cor- responding advantage. You will then clean the metal by boiling out in acid, and wherever the enamel comes, the ground and the back of the metal also is to be scraped quite clean and bright all over. Choose two or three good rich enamels, ranging from dark to pale sea-green, and grind it up fairly fine, and wash it well till all milkiness disappears ; then paint the back of each plate, wherever there is to be enamel in front, with gum traga- canth and water, and dust the backing (see chapter on Enamel Work) all over. Shake off the surplus, and leave to dry. Then take the ground greens, add a tiny drop 140 of gum to each mixture, fill in the spaces left for the sea, shading the greens from dark at the edge to light at the center, making the lightest green a little darker than the central stone, because everything must lead up to that. Then fire carefully in the muffle until the enamel flows smooth and shining, remove from the furnace, and cool slowly in a sand bath or in front of the stove. When cool, you can remove any irregu- larities of surface with a corundum file and water. If necessary, re-fire to get all smooth and bright. You will now have to arrange the fitting of the two together. Take a piece of io silver, a little larger than the outline of the pendant, mark the outline all round with a point, leaving projections where loops come, then saw out the center leaving only a band -|th inch wide. Cut a narrow band of No. 5 silver, bend it round the outline, and when it fits solder the ends together, and solder the whole to the plate you have sawed out, so that you have, as it were, a skeleton setting. Treat the other side in a similar way. File the setting into a wave-like line, and, after soldering two strong loops to the central plate, file away Hi Pendants Pendants the surplus metal, and make the whole setting smooth to the touch and pleasant to look at. Take a fine drill, and, fixing the front in place, drill a hole here and there through the setting and the relief. Do this with the back also. Make taper pins of silver wire to fit the holes, and, after rubbing the edges of the setting over with a burnisher, insert the pins and press them firmly home. Cut them off close to the setting, and take a small graining-tool (fig. 77) or a hollow- headed punch, the hollow of which is not larger than the head of the pin, grain the point over with a circular movement until the rough head of the pin is well rounded. This fixes the pin firmly in its place. You will now need to make the loop, and a little knop to act as a spreader for the suspending chains. You may make the knop to sug- 142 gest the • air. Draw a sea-gull with out- stretched downward drooping wings. You can see them any day about the bridges on the Thames. Beat it up from a bit of 7 or 8 silver, underneath you can place a band of curling waves. The ground can either be cut away or it can be en- amelled in different blues. If enamel is used, the silver must be fine silver ; and you must solder on the back with 1 8-carat gold solder- -other solder is apt to be destroyed in the firing. If you prefer the pierced ground, cut it away with a metal saw, and solder the bird on a back of No. 5 thickness. Take care that the joins are all well flushed up with solder. Provide for suspension loops, coiled rings for the bottom, and a loop like this 51 for the top loop, all soldered on the back plate. Cut the ground away again and file up the whole true, and clean and stone ready for polishing. The loop is made of a thick piece of metal, No. 8 or 10, shaped as in fig. 7 8a. Take a rounded doming-punch and hollow it well out from the back (fig. 78 b). Take a pair of round-nosed pliers and bend it as in fig. 78c, and solder the ends together. Have ready the coiled H3 Pendants Pendants rings, and solder them to the loop (see fig. 78 d), and fix a grain between the two for the sake of strength no less than for appearance. Make chain loops as before described, and beat up four little bosses. They may be shells or little coiled fishes; make them double, sol- der them together, solder loops top and bottom, and then loopthewhole up temporarily to see how it hangs. After correcting any inequalities, solder all the chains together, then polish with the scratch-brush and beer, and after- ward finish with rouge. The enamel por- tion can be polished with putty powder and a little water. A Fig. 78. 144 CHAPTER XVII Hair Ornaments and Combs — Silver Hairpin— The Skeleton Sphere— Hardening the Pin — A Comb in Silver — How to make the Prongs — The Joint — The Head of the Comb — Arranging the Stones — The Groups of Leaves — The Pin for the Hinge —Setting the Pearls — How to Drill Pearls Combs and other ornaments for the hair Hair Orna- must be very light, and free from sharp ments an ^ angles or roughnesses. The required Combs lightness is obtained either by using very thin metal, or by building up the design out of wire or filigree. Let us take the simplest first, and make a long pin for the hair. Take a rounded iron doming-punch and beat out two half-domes out of No. 2 or ,3 silver, file the edges level, and solder the two halves together to make a complete ball. Leave a hole to \ inch wide in the center of one of the half-domes and a smaller hole opposite this and fill it with pitch. Then w^arm the pitch-block, and wet the silver ball and press it into the pitch ; then take a fine tracer and trace spiral lines round the dome, taking care not to drive the punch in too deeply; then Hair Orna- ments and Combs with other punches chase the surface into rounded spiral ribs, either with a narrow rib between each pair, or simply a series of rounded spirals. Next take twisted wire, the smallest size you can get, and solder it into the hol- lows between the ribs. This done, cut a piece of stout silver wire 6 inches long and file it into a taper pin ; solder the chased ball on the top of this pin so that the end of the pin projects very slightly. Next take two rings of wire, about J inch in diameter, solder the two together crosswise, and solder a small bead at the top. Then solder this on the top of a tiny piece of round wire like a column, and put a grain of silver in each angle (see fig. 80) ; then solder a tiny half- dome of the silver on the top of the large ball and the skeleton ball and pillar on the top of this again. Where the pillar meets the half dome (fig. 81) you must put a ring of fine wire to cover the joint and make a neat finish. Now take a piece of silver wire and coil it on a mandrel, J inch in diameter, about a dozen times. Saw the rings apart and solder two together as before described. At the junctions you will solder two small rings of fiat wire, just large enough to let the pin pass through both at the top and the bottom. Cut the remaining rings in half, and solder a half-ring in each angle. Repeat this until you have a skeleton sphere. It is better to finish soldering at the top of the sphere before pro- ceeding to the other pole ; and p when soldering the other ends, it is better to cover the part al- ready soldered with loam and water, or whi- ting and water ; this will prevent the solder from melting and the rings from falling to pieces. The skeleton sphere can now be strengthened by a row of tiny half-domes and groups of six grains alternately ; the 147 Hair Orna- ments and Combs Hair Orna- ments and Combs width of each half-dome and flower being exactly the width apart of the ribs. Solder one to the center of each rib, and let all the flowers and small half-domes be soldered to each other. Next file away the crossing- wires within the top and bottom rings, and slip the completed ball into its place on the pin ; find the point at which it looks best, and there solder a collar of wire on the pin. You will now solder the skele- ton sphere in its place, beginning at the top. Protect the half not being soldered with loam or whiting. When the upper join is made, clean away the loam or whi- ting and boil the metal clean and white in pickle. Scrape the joint bright, and slip another ring on the pin to make a collar underneath the spheres. Before proceed- ing to solder, make two stout rings inch inside measure, and tie them opposite each other where the pin and sphere meet. Then protect the rest of the work with loam or whiting as before, and finish sol- dering. Next make six small hollow spheres of No. 2 metal, and having coiled up a number of small rings of fine wire or fine twist, have ready a number of small beads of silver, and solder the rings round the outsides of the balls, and put a grain in 148 every alternate circle. Then solder a ring on Hair Orna- the top of each ™ents and ball, and make Combs six lengths of fine chain as de- scribed for neck- laces, or simply of circles of wire, alternate twist and plain, large 1 and small, and loop three balls on each loop as shown in fig. 79. Next hammer the pin carefully on a bent stake to make it hard and springy. The, whole can now be cleaned and polished. To Make a Comb.— Take a strip of silver, size 10 ordinary gage, and mark out a simple three- or four- 149 Hair Orna- ments and Combs pronged comb, as in the lower portion of fig. 82. Leave a space of at least three- quarters of an inch before you begin the prongs. Then saw out the prongs and file up the edges clean and smooth. Draw a piece of fine tube, as de- scribed before, about -jig- inch in diameter, and sol- der a length along the back of these prongs as at a in fig. 83. You will now require to make the top of the comb. The best way is to get a few clear stones and arrange them into a pleasant pattern, Fig * 8 3 - with different shaped bosses of metal and wreaths of filigree (fig. 84). This was an arrangement of aqua- marines and pearls. The pearls should be of irregular shapes, and drilled so that they may be mounted as roses. First make settings for the aquamarines, and solder them on a back-plate hammered up into a domical section. Then make strong twigs of thick wire hammered taper and soldered together in a simple interlacing pattern embracing the settings. The pattern must not be too regular, 150 nor must the stones be of equal color. When the main stems are soundly Size or Hair Orna- ments and Combs Fig. 84. soldered, take silver wire and make leaves as before described, and solder them to- 151 Combs Hair Orna- gether in groups of five, with grains be- ments and tween each pair of leaves. Then make a calyx or skeleton setting for each of the pearl roses, and solder a calyx on the tip of each principal twig, leaving enough of the twig to pass through the pearl and be riveted or grained over when the pearl is fixed. This will be done when all the soldering, cleaning, and polishing has been completed. Hav- ing fixed the posi- tion of the roses, you can now arrange the groups of leaves in order on the stem, and solder them, using loam or whiting to protect the joints. The center line of each leaf should be tan gential to the main curve (fig. 85). When all the leaves have been soldered on you will need to strengthen the bottom plate both for the attachment of the hinge and to bind up the settings for the stones into a connected whole. Take a piece of stout sheet-silver shaped as at b in fig. 78, and, having filed it up smooth, tie it firmly with wire, or strong clips of bent iron 152 Fig. 85. wire, to the body of the comb. When Hair Orna- the solder has flushed well in and around merits and every joint boil the work clean in acid, and Comt)S then file a groove with a rounded file along the bottom edge of the projecting tongue, and solder a tube of the same size as before into the groove ; file spaces into each tube to receive the projections in the other. There should be not less than five joints — three above and two below (fig. 86). This Fig. 86. way of making the hinge is an easy one, but it is not the best, because it is almost im- possible to file the joints of the hinge per- fectly true and square without the joint tool. If you wish to spend more time on the work you can make the hinge in short lengths, as described for the casket hinge, and then, having slipped all the parts of the joint on a brass pin filed to fit, tie the head and the tang of the comb to- 1 S3 Hair Orna- gether with the hinge between ; then just ments and tack the tubes — -three to the tang and two to the head — with a tiny pane! of solder to each ; do not flush the solder or you will spoil the whole hinge by running the solder into the joints. As a precaution you should paint the inside of the tubes and the faces of the joints with a little rouge and water. When the parts are tacked, take the work apart and solder it all firmly. Next make two hollow balls, and solder one to the end of a pin (fig. 87) which file a shoulder on the other end of the pin just where it comes through the hinge. When the comb is finally fitted together the pin will be securely riveted over the ball. When the whole is stoned with Water of Ayr stone and has been polished, you may set the stones as before described. In fixing the pearls you will need to use shellac to cement them to their settings. Take a stick of shellac, and after heating one end in the gas flame, draw it out into a long thread. Then heat the setting of Fig. 87. * © exactly fits the hinge, and, having drilled the other ball. J 54 each stone, and wind a little of this thread Hair Orna- of shellac round it. Warm the pearl, merits and and run a little of the shellac in the hole ; Combs then, holding the setting and the pearl, one in each hand, over the flame, slip the pearl over the peg while the cement is liquid ; when it is cold you can rivet the peg very carefully. If the pearls have not been drilled, you must drill them. To do this you will need a holder. It Fig. 88. consists of a strip of brass bent as in fig. 88 and fixed in a hand-vise ; a graduated series of holes is drilled through the two contiguous halves, the inner edges of the holes are then slightly countersunk to pre- vent injury to the pearl, a slip collar is made, and the instrument is complete. Put the pearl you wish to drill in the pair of holes that most nearly fits it, slip the collar until the pearl is firmly held. *55 Hair Orna- You can now drill the hole without danger ments and Q f injuring the pearl or your own fingers. Combs There is no need to drill the pearl right through, a well-made peg well cemented will hold quite well, even if it only goes half-way into the pearl. If the pearl is specially valuable the peg may be keyed on. This is done by drilling a hole and making it larger at the bottom than at the top. The peg used is made of two half- round wires put together and soldered to the cap, the two ends are then slightly filed away, and a very tiny wedge of metal inserted ; the peg is then cemented and pressed into the hole. The pressure on the wedge drives the two halves of wire outward and the peg can not be with- drawn. It can only be drilled out. Care is needed in doing this or the pearl may be split. CHAPTER XVIII Bracelets — The Hammered Bracelet — The Hinge Bracelet — The Band — The Snap — The Hinge — Fitting the Joints — The Flexible Bracelet — - Cleaning and Burnishing Bracelets Bracelet sizes range from 6 \ to 7 inches in circumference. I 5 6 Take a short length of thick silver wire about -|^0-th inch in diameter, anneal it, and flatten it out to a square section in the center and fan-shaped and feather-edged at the ends (fig. 89). When you have stretched it out to at least two inches longer than the circum- ference required, take a sharp chisel and divide the fan-shaped ends as shown in the diagram. Anneal the metal thoroughly, next open out the strips of metal and hammer them into a more regular taper. Do this to both sides, and anneal again. Mark out the right lengths of the bracelet, and bend the ends to a sharp angle, so that the tips of the ends will just reach the extremities of this line. Solder on each bend a short piece of silver the 1 57 Bracelets Bracelets thickness of the bracelet, making the band of the bracelet just the right length, and file up the ends true and ciean. With a pair of smooth, round-nosed pliers bend up the taper twigs into simple scrolls (fig. 90) and connect them with each other by means of large beads made as before described, and flattened with the hammer on the square bench stake. When this has been done to both sides, bend the band round with two pairs of strong pliers into the shape of a flattened circle. To avoid marking the metal you must make thin copper or brass shields to slip over the jaws of the pliers. When the curve is perfect, and the ends butt cleanly together, take a small jewel, say a chryso- 158 prase, an opal, or a garnet. Make a box setting for it, and solder the setting on one side of the band, so that one-half of the setting will be on the band, the other half standing free. This will cover the junction of the ends and yet give the metal play, so that it can be slipped over the hand without difficulty (fig. 91). The outside of the bracelet may be hammered into a rounded or softly beveled section, Fig. 91. and the surface afterward decorated with chasing-tools. This work will, of course, be done upon pitch. The inside of the bracelet must be scraped and filed clean and smooth and rounded, and all rough- nesses removed from every part of the work with the Water of Ayr stone. It is now ready for whitening, stoning, and polishing. This done, the stone can be set and the final polishing given. When, 1 59 Bracelets Bracelets unless you wish to oxidize the work, which can be done as described elsewhere, the whole is finished. To Make a Hinged Bracelet . — Cut an ellipse of the size required out of stout sheet brass (fig. 92). This is to serve as a guide when bending the band of the bracelet. Take two lengths of square silver wire and make two ovals to fit closely over the brass pattern. Solder the two ends together, and cut a narrow slip of No. 6 or 8 sheet-silver as broad as you wish to make the band. This can be decorated in repousse with very simple patterns of symmetrically arranged dots or a simple running pattern. Bend the band to fit the outside of the oval rings ; tie the band and the rings 160 firmly together as in the diagram (fig. 93), and solder the whole soundly together. This makes the band of the bracelet. You have now to make the hinge and snap. To Make the Hinge or Joint . — Draw a length of thin silver tube as wide as the thickness of the bracelet edge, and another length just to fit inside this tube. Drill a hole through the edge wires of the Fig. 93. bracelet, and enlarge this with the needle file, so that the larger tube will slip com- fortably into its place. Now cut off a short length of the larger tube a little longer than the depth of the bracelet band, and halve it lengthwise with the frame- saw. Into one half solder two lengths of the small tube, with a space between them — each piece being a third as long as the 11 * 161 Bracelets Bracelets joint — -and into the center of the other half solder another piece of tube filed to fit exactly between the first two (see fig. 94). Fit these two halves of the joint together after painting each with a little rouge and water to prevent them from sticking togetherwhile being soldered into the bracelet. Scrape the outside of the tube quite clean, and tie it in place with binding- wire. See that the joint in the tube lies across the edge of the bracelet as in fig. 95. Put some small panels of solder on each side of the tube, and solder it without giving too much heat, or the solder may flush into the joint and spoil the work. 162 Fig. 94. File the ends of the tube flush with the edge of the bracelet. The snap is made by cutting two strips of 8-gage metal, one for the back, and one for the face of the snap. File the face into the form at fig. 96. The upper space is for the spring plate, the lower for the bottom plate of the snap. For this latter take a strip of 8- or 9-gage silver, file it to fit the lower slot B, and solder it at right angles to the back-plate(seefig. 97). The spring-plate is a narrow strip of the same metal filed to fit the groove C. Solder the end of it to the bottom plate at D so that the edge nearest the back-plate is separated from the latter by a space exactly the thickness of the metal (fig. 98). If you now file notches in the band of the bracelet lengthwise down the joint, and saw the band through on the opposite side, the bracelet will come in two, and can be hinged up temporarily with a brass peg. The snap-plates can now be soldered 163 Fig. 98. Fig. 96. Bracelets Bracelets Fig. 99. to the other end. The plate A should first be soldered in position, a lining-plate, B, being soldered inside each half of the bracelet (figs. 99, 100), and a slot filed at C to admit the thumbpiece of the snap. Fix the snap- plate carefully in place, rouge it, and tie it with wire. Scrape the back of the snap-plate and the end of the brace- let which abuts on this ; tie binding-wire round the whole bracelet, and solder the back-plate of the snap to the proper half of the band. File the joint clean and smooth, and release the snap by pressing the point of a file or a knife upon the spring-plate through the slot C. The thumbpiece, made of a strip of silver, can now be soldered in position, and the snap is complete. A loop may be soldered on each side for the attachment of the safety-chain if you wish, but it is not absolutely necessary. All the constructive enrichment of the band — as, for instance, a panel of filigree- 164 Fig. 1 00. Fig. ioi, work, foliage, or set stones— should be done before the joint and snap are made, otherwise the bracelet may not snap or close properly. How to Make a Flexible Bracelet . — Make a number of small half-domes out of No. 5 silver. Take a silver wire, about 20 gage, and coil it round a paper - guarded mandrel ; anneal it, slip off the coils of wire, and with the saw cut off the loops one by one until you have a good number. Boil the rings clean, and arrange them together (see fig. xoi) on a level piece of charcoal. Solder them all together, and solder a half-dome in the middle and a grain in the intersections of the circles. Make a number of these links, say twenty. Make a similar number with groups of three small grains added in the intersections of the circles (fig. 102). These are the orna- mental loops to the chain of which the flexible part of the bracelet will be made. Take a mandrel of flattened iron or brass wire, coil a strip of thin paper round it, and x6 5 Fig. 102. Bracelets Bracelets after the paper flattened or half-round wire, gage 1 8 or 20. Saw these links off, and with them loop the first made links in groups of three and solder each link ; the three central orna- mental links can be looped together also (fig. 103). You will now be able to loop up the whole inch length easily, or you can make the bracelet with a single row of ringedloops,as shown in fig. 104. This done, make the two end panels, one to hold the snap and the other for the catch -plate. You can do them in repousse out of 8- gage silver. A pair of little rabbits, or squirrels in a bower of leaves, would look well, and the relief should be fairly high. The group should be done in one piece, leaving a clear line down the center for the joint. When the modeling is complete, boil it out and 166 Fig. 104. solder on a back of No. 6 metal. Saw Bracelets the panel in two, and solder the slotted catch-plate centrally on one and the snap- plate to the other. File out a slot in the catch-plate side and fit the two together, and file up clean. When the thumbpiece has been added, the clasp is complete, except for the loops. Mark on each half the proper position for the loops of the chain-band ; solder on stout links of wire. These should be circles and soldered firmly to the back-plate of the clasp, and each loop further strengthened by soldering a grain of silver on each side of it (see fig. 105). Now loop it all up together, boil it out, and clean in pickle. Then re- move the traces of pickle by boiling it in hot water and soda. Polish it on the scratch-brush with beer, and brighten the domes of each loop with a burnisher. The clasp can also be gone over with the bur- nisher with great advantage* It may be well to mention that springs of catches made in 9-carat gold last longer than those made in silver. Fig. 105. 167 CHAPTER XIX Gold Work — The Care of the Material — Board Sweep — Method of Treatment — Alloys — Hair Ornaments — The Ingot — Drawing the Wire — Making Grains — Leaves — Flowers — Gold Sol- der — Nine-Carat Gold for the Pin — Study of Old Work Gold Work Gold work, on account of the greater cost of the material, needs very much more care on the part of the workman. Board sweep, lemel, polishings, the sweep- ings of the floor underneath the work-bench — -must all be carefully preserved for re- fining when a sufficient quantity has been obtained. The material should always be used, so that it gives its utmost decorative value. The work must be built up out of thin sheets or wires, not filed up out of the solid. Gold, by its very ductility and malleability, invites this method of treatment ; and it is the one most used in all the finest periods. To work in solid gold is to waste precious material needlessly. Used thin it gives a beauty unattainable by other means. The quality of the gold to be used depends on the nature of the work. For enameled panels 1 68 fine gold is best, but on account of its ex- Gold Work treme softness it will not stand much wear. To give it hardness, it is alloyed with varying quantities of copper and silver. Copper by itself gives the gold a red color, silver by itself a greenish color ; the two together gives the alloy almost the original color again. The best alloy, both for working and appearance after- ward, is naturally that which is most nearly fine gold — viz., 22-carat. The next best is 20-carat, while the ordinary gold of trade jewelry is 18-carat. But this, if alloyed with copper only, is not pleasant in color, is much harder to work, and is liable to crack if used for repousse work. If it is alloyed with silver only the alloy is paler in color than gold, but it is very pleasant to work, and is very duc- tile and kindly. For repousse gold may be allied with silver down to 1 2-carat ; but beyond 12-carat the alloy looks much more like silver than gold, and the effect of it is not, perhaps, much better than gold-washed silver. Yet it is as well to remember that the addition of even a small quantity of gold to silver gives a richness of color which can not be obtained in any other way. 169 will suppose you wish to make a pair of hair ornaments in 20-carat gold. First you will buy from any of the bullion merchants i oz. of fine gold. Take io dwts. of this, i. e. one- half, and to every dwt. add two grains of fine silver and two of alloy copper, in all i dwt. 16 grs. Put it in a crucible with a little borax, melt and cast it in a narrow ingot. When cool, draw it out on the anvil into a square wire, hammer the tip taper, and after an- nealing draw it down with the draw-plate until you get it to size o. Coil it up and anneal it carefully on the mop ; boil it out in hydrochloric pickle. Next run the ends into beads, some large for leaves, and some small for berries, and snip off 106. short lengths. You will now need solder. Take two or three dwts. Gold Work of the alloy you are using ; to every dwt. add 5 grains of fine silver, and melt on the charcoal block with a little borax ; flatten the resulting button of alloy with a hammer, roll it out thin, and cut it up into tiny panels readyfor soldering. Take the prepared bits of wire, flatten the larger beaded ends into leaf shape with a few taps on the square bench stake (see fig. 52), group them on either side of a central stem (see fig. 107), lay tiny panels of solder over each junction, and direct the flame on each joint in suc- cession till the whole has been soldered. Do this until you have as many groups as you want. In like manner make groups of the smaller beads (fig. 109). Now dome up a piece of sheet- iron into a half ball the size of the proposed ornament. Make two rings of plain wire, a size or two larger than that used for the twigs and leaves, and between them solder a ring of twist wire. This 17 1 Gold Work is for the foundation band round the edge. This circular band must be soldered to a circle of flattened wire, the wire being bent edgewise. You will next dome up a ball of gold in two halves out of size i or 2 ; when the metal just fits the doming-block, take a file and file away the superfluous metal and having made an air-hole in one half solder the two together. Bend up a small strip of metal into a tube about -j^g-th inch long, solder this on a 5iig circle of size 2, domed slightly ; on the top of the tube solder the gold bead. Next coil up six rings of fine twisted wire, just large enough to fit in between the hollow bead and the base, tie them all in position with binding- wire, and solder them to the stem, to the hollow bead and the base (see fig. no). Make grains out of small lengths of wire or bits of scrap gold, and solder a grain in the angle between the ring and the bead and in the angle between the ring and the base. Round the edge of the base put a double row of twisted wire to en- close the upright rings. Between each pair of rings you must now solder a group of three grains, but take care not to use too 172 Fig. much heat, or you will melt the rings. Gold Work This, when boiled out clean, forms the central boss of the whole ornament. Tie this and the large ring already made on the iron ball with binding-wire. You can now arrange the groups of leaves and berries in their places between the boss and the ring. Each group must touch two others and the top and bottom rings. If this is not done, the work will not be strong. While soldering these it may be well to paint the parts not to be soldered with a paste of loam or whiting and water, or pipe-clay and water, as a precaution against melt- ing. The solder itself should run more easily than that used for the groups of leaves. To secure this, take as much of the first solder as you think you may require, and add to it a piece of silver solder, about two grains of silver solder to each pennyweight of the original solder. When the soldering is complete, boil the work clean. Have ready a num- ber of small grains also boiled clean, and solder one in the angle between the twigs and the bottom, using this both for ap- 173 Fig. no. Gold Work pearance and strength (fig. hi). This done, again boil out clean, and having made three circles of wire, size 22, solder them together as in fig. 1 12. Take a short length of tube, like that you made for the cen- tral boss, and tap it with a female screw ; file up the ends true and sol- der it to the center of the three rings. Fig. 1 13 shows another arrangement for the bottom of the filigree dome. This trefoil must now be soldered to the back of the bottom ring, and the first part of the work complete. Fig. 114 shows the knop complete, but with a boss of coiled twist-wire in the center instead of that first described. The next is to make the pin for attachment to the hair. It should be of 9-carat gold. Take in the proportion of 9 of gold to of copper and 7J of silver, i. e. *]\ grains each of copper and silver to 9 174 grains of fine gold will make i dwt. of Gold Work 9-carat gold alloy. Having weighed out your alloy, melted it, and cast the ingot, draw the ingot out into wire, size 18. Cut off a piece double the length of the pin, bend it in the center, and solder a segment of wire to make a complete circle (see fig. 106). This strengthens the end of the pin. Next make a hinge out of a small tube as described for the brooch hinge (see fig. 74). On the centerportion of the joint solder a male screw to fit the female already pre- pared (see fig. 1 14). File away all rough- ness ; no project- ing points must be left, or they will catch in the hair and cause inconvenience. All work intended for wear should be smooth and pleasant to the touch. The work can now be stoned and polished with pumice, crocus, and rouge. In all jewelry work, but most of all in gold work, the effect must be built out of small details. Design is the language 175 Fig. 1 1 3. Gold Work you learn from your work, and as your skill in handiwork grows, so will your power of design. Design can not be separated from handiwork. It is the expression of your personality in terms of the material in which you work. One has only to look at any piece of early- gold work, Egyptian, Mykenean, Etrus- can, Indian, or Anglo-Saxon, to realize what rich effects can be pro- duced by repeti- tion. The beau- tiful patterns evolved by Arab, Persian and Hin- doo artists from the simplest ele- ments, offer a world of sugges- tion to the young craftsman, and open up ideas for future use. Do not attempt to copy such work, but study the principles of contrasted line, texture, and form. A grasp of the method of building up all work out of thin sheet, will help you to apply these principles for yourself. 176 CHAPTER XX Gold Necklace with Pendant Fleurs de Lis — The Brass Mold — Burnishing the Gold over the Matrix — Another Method of Making Fleurs de Lis — Engraved Matrices Take a piece of brass large enough and Gold Neck- thick enough for the pendant, and having carefully transferred to it the outline of your pattern, pierce out the shape with the saw, and file it up to the shape of the pendant (fig. 115), omitting of course the rings and loops for suspension. Take a cement stick (fig. 1 1 6), which is merely a short taper handle of wood with roughened end. A good-sized lump of engravers' cement is warmed in the flame of the blowpipe or spirit lamp and fixed on the roughened end of the stick; the cement while warm is pressed into any shape re- quired by rolling it on a cold iron plate 12 177 Gold Neck- lace with Pendant sprinkled with water to prevent the cement from sticking. In this case you will press the warmed cement on the iron so that you get a level top (fig. n 6). Take the brass model, warm it, and press it into the cement so that ex- actly half remains ex- posed. Smooth the cement down round the edges with a wetted steel spatula. Cool it in water, and when cold take a piece of 22 gold, size 2, anneal it well, and with a rounded burnisher press and rub the gold over the brass shape. Anneal the gold frequently at first, and you will find the work easier. When you have got the shape very nearly, warm the gold, and press it firmly on the cement until it sticks (fig. 117). Now with the point of the burnisher you can drive the gold into the angles, and finish the shape completely. Re- move the brass mold from the cement, clean it well, and refix it with its other 178 face upward. Repeat the burnishing Gold Neck- process with another piece of gold, cut kce with away the surplus metal from the outside Pendant with the shears, and file up the edges until the two fit perfectly together (see fig. 1 1 5), and boil them out. You will Fig. i 1 7. now need to strengthen the two halves of the ornament, so that they may not get crushed out of shape after being fastened together. Take snippings of silver or short lengths of silver wire curved to fit the hollows at the back of each half, and 179 Gold Neck- solder them in place with panels of lace with 1 8-carat solder, made by adding 6 grains Pendant G f fi ne s }i ver to every dwt. of fine gold, or, if you use the scraps and filings from the 22-carat, 4 grains of fine silver to each dwt. of scrap. This done, boil the work clean, tie the two halves together with fine binding-wire, fitting the edges very closely to each other or the solder will not flush properly. Remember that in gold work you can not fit too closely ; in silver work, on the contrary, if the work fits too well, the solder runs along the surface and not into the join. When all the joins are soldered the work can be filed up and the hanging rings fixed. The smaller sizes will be made in like manner. If you wish for more elaborate forms you can model the shape in wax, and having made a plaster matrix, make a cast in type metal. You can now rub the gold over the type metal cast in the same way as over the brass model ; or, having made the plaster matrix, you can take a zinc cast of it in a sand mold, and rub the gold into it instead of over it. Any irreg- ularities in the mold can be removed by chasing the surface with repousse tools. 180 Another method is to take a thick Gold Neck- piece of brass large enough for your pur- lace with pose, and having hammered the surface Pendant carefully to make the metal uniformly dense and tough, take a scorper, and with it hollow out a matrix of the form you require. The surface of the ornament can be further modeled up with rounded chasing tools to almost any degree of fine- ness. The effect of your work can be seen by oiling the metal and taking fre- quent impressions in wax or modeling paste. Into this mold the thin sheet gold can either be rubbed or beaten in with a hammer and a strip of lead (see fig. 1 1 8). The lead prevents injury either to the mold or the metal, and by spreading out under the blow, forces the gold into all parts of the mold. If fine silver is used it can with care be hammered solid into the mold, and then filed off true. In all these methods it is well to re- member that the forms must be clear, and studied closely from nature, or based on some form which you have found by experience looks well in work. There must be no under-cutting or the work will not draw from the mold when you have beaten it in. 181 Gold Neck- The plan of engraving matrices in brass lace with was one extensively used in old work. Pendant Many of the elaborate necklaces shown in the gold room of the British Museum are made up of simple forms produced in molds like those just described, then Fig. i i 8. soldered together, and linked up with rough pearls and uncut stones. Having by one or other of the above methods made your pendants, group them round the 4^ circle, and at the points of sus- pension put either a stone, a simple boss of gold, or a beehive coil of twisted wire, 182 with a network or openwork of wire round it. Solder three strong loops to the backs of these bosses, make some lengths of chain and a snap, and loop the whole together as before. The central pendant may be made longer, and the side ones hung in dimin- ishing lengths from the centre. For this, make small half balls of thin gold, solder backs to them, and put a ring of twist round the join. Fix two loops opposite to each other on the backs. These will now be linked up between the pen- dants and the main bosses, completing the necklace. CHAPTER XXI Locket or Pendant Casket — The Frame — The Bezel — -The Hinge — The Back — Fitting the Hinge— The Joint Tool — Swivel Loops The student would be well advised to attempt this first of all in silver, as these lockets are by no means easy to make. The fitting and the hanging require very great care. Take a piece of silver, size 8, a little wider than the full depth of the pendant (fig. 119). Bend it up into 1 83 Gold Neck- lace with Pendant Locket or Pendant Casket Locket or the shape of the outline in fig. 1 20, and Pendant solder the two ends firmly together. Next Casket take two plates of size 6, one for the back and one for the front, dome slightly, and solder them to the outline frame. File the surplus metal from the edges and mark the center line down the sides of the frame, and saw the box apart lengthwise (fig. 1 21 a). You have now two halves which exactly fit each other. Mark the sides, which should come together so that you may readily fit the two in the right place. Next take a strip of No. 5, a little deeper than the sides of each half locket, 184 bend it to fit exactly within the locket, and solder it in place (fig. i2ib). This is to form the bezel on which the lid fits, and by which the lid is held firmly in place. Now boil the work clean and fit the two to- gether. Having drawn a short length of small tube from which to make the hinge, with a small round file or a joint file make a deep groove along the line of the joint (fig. 122). It should be as deep as possible, so that the tube may not project and spoil the out- line of the pendant. Cut off* three lengths of the tube, so that the three together just fill the space provided for the hinge. File the ends of these short lengths true and square in the joint-tool (fig. 120). Mark JOINT Fig. 21 A. Fig. 121B. Locket or Pendant Casket the position of the center one, and after taking apart the two halves, of the locket, solder the center length of tube in its place on one half of the locket and the other two lengths on their half. The 185 Locket or Pendant Casket loop can now be soldered on. It can be either a plain or a swivel loop. A swivel loop is made as already de- scribed in the chapter on Pendants, only instead of having the small rings at the bottom a hole is drilled up through the point of the loop and a wire, beaded at one Fig. 122. Fig. 123. end, is slipped in, and bent over to form a ring below the loop (fig. 123). This ring should be soldered. The swivel and the hole must be painted with a little rouge and water, so that the solder may not run and make a solid instead of a swivel joint. Stones may be set on the front and the front panel cut away, leaving a narrow rim. An enamel panel can then be fixed in from the back, as described in the chapter on Settings. 186 CHAPTER XXII Carving in Metal — Where Carving is Necessary — Making the Tools — Tempering — The Wax Model — The Use of the Chisels — Finishing — The Spiral Knop — The Wreathed Setting Small figures, wreaths, sprays, and small animals and birds, can be very easily carved out of the solid metal. As men- tioned in another chapter, where the work is to be enameled, it is necessary that it should be carved out of a material which is perfectly even in texture or the enamel will fly off. The tools required are exceedingly simple. A few chisels of various sizes made out of short lengths of bar steel, a chasing- hammer, and a few files and ordinary repousse tools will alone be necessary. To Make the Tools .- — Cut off a few 5-inch lengths of square bar steel of different sizes and different widths ; soften the ends by heating them to a cherry red. Let them cool gradually. File the ends 187 Carving Metal Carving in of each into a blunt bevel (see fig. 124 Metal A, B). Fig. 125 shows an enlarged view of the cutting end of the tool. Fix each in the vise and file off the square edges along the sides and the top, so that the tool will be more comfortable to the hand. It will be well to have one or two made with a rounded bevel like a gouge, and one with a rather sharp beveled edge for occasional use. Having got them filed up into shape, and the sides and top made nice and smooth with emery-cloth, harden each by heating it to a cherry red and dropping it into a bucket of cold water. They will now need tempering. First brighten the metal at the cutting edge by rubbing it on emery-cloth. Then hold the tool in the flame until the first pale straw color comes. Have ready a vessel of cold water, and as soon as the color appears, cool the tool in the water. When all have been treated, you will be ready to begin to work. Take your lump of silver or gold, hammer it well all over to make it more 188 dense and uniform in texture. It is well to have the metal longer than the object you wish to carve, so that you can hold it in a small bench-vise while carving. Before beginning, it is wise to take the precaution of making a model in wax of the subject you intend to carve. Block out the principal masses with the gouge- shaped chisel. Do not be too eager to get down to the surface of your model. It is better to get the action and move- ment before attempting modeling in de- tail. Then, with the smaller chisels you can go over the work, and realize the form more completely, taking care always to drive the chisel along the line of the bevel which rests upon the work (see fig. 124 c). At this stage you may take the work out of the vise and put it on the pitch-block, and work it up with repousse tools. Oval matting-tools, with a slightly rounded surface, will be found very useful for this. Use the chisels now and then to remove any metal which by repeated working has become too hard to yield to the tracing-tool. With smooth punches and tracers you can get almost any degree of fineness of work. If, however, the work is to be afterward enameled, it is useless to spend too much 189 Carving in Metal Carving in time upon surface modeling ; a great deal Metal must be left to be done in the enameling. Sprays of leaves and flowers or knops of leafage can be very easily produced by this method in the following manner. Suppose you wish to carve a spiral knop of nut leaves. Take a piece of 1 6 - gage silver, beat it into a dome of the size anddepthofyour knop. Anneal the metal. Now draw with a fine brush and Indian ink the spiral twigs and the masses of leaves. See that branches or twigs stretch from each line of the spiral to the lines above and below it (fig. 126). This is in order that the knop may be strong all over. With a drill and a fret-saw pierce out the interspaces. Take your gravers, begin with the round scorper, after wetting the tip of the tool and cut grooves length- wise along the twigs, so that the spiral growth of the twig is emphasized. Next, 190 with a flat scorper cut the groups of leaves so as to show their overlapping. With a small gouge you can now vein the leaves and add any necessary finishing touches to the twigs. The knop may be finished up still further by putting it upon the pitch and add- ing any refinements of detail you may desire. How to Carve a Wreathed Setting.— A fine stone will often look well in a conical wreathed setting carved out of thicksheetmetal (fig. 127). Mark out the section of the setting at A, fig. 128. Produce the sides till they meet. From this point as center draw circles as shown. On the base make a semicircle, and divide it into any number of equal parts, say 16. Set out these on the larger segment, join the last point to the center. The enclosed form is that required to make the setting. Cut this shape out with the shears, bend the metal up to fit the stone, and solder the edges. Draw on this (fig. 129) a wavy spiral of twigs, and while keeping the design very open, see that the various 191 Carving in Metal Carving in Metal 192 branches and leaves are well knit together. Pierce out the interspaces with the drill and saw. Then take an engraving-stick and a piece of gold-beater's skin, warm the cement on the stick, and shape it with a wetted thumb and forefinger just to fit the setting. Place the skin over the warmed cement, and press the set- ting, also warmed, well down upon the s kin-covered surface. The Fig - I2 9- cement will press the skin out through the holes in the setting, and when cold will keep it firmly in its place. Unless the skin is used the cement is apt to spread all over the metal, so that you can not see what you are doing. You can now carve the work with scorpers, as before described. CHAPTER XXIII Casting — The Cuttlefish Mold — Flasks — The Loam- Smoking the Mold — Slate or Bath-brick Molds Very small castings, such as reliefs to set in rings and sprays of foliage, heads, birds, 13 T 93 Carving in Metal Casting Casting etc., can very easily be done in cuttlefish bone. Choose a clean and perfect speci- men cuttlefish, cut it in half, and rub each face perfectly fiat. Insert three small register pegs in one face (fig. 130), leaving plenty of room between for the pattern. Press the two faces together, so that they Fig. 130. fit absolutely close. Lay the pattern, which must not be anywhere undercut, in the space between the pegs, and press the two halves of the mold carefully and firmly, so that you may get a perfectly clear impression. Take them apart, re- 194 move the pattern, make a funnel-shaped channel for the metal, also channels for air-holes, leading radially outward (fig. 13 1), and tie the mold up with binding- wire (fig. 132). Make a little pit in a piece of charcoal large enough to take the gold or silver you wish to melt, tie 195 Casting Casting the charcoal to the top of the mold, so that the pit comes opposite the channel or “ pour.” Make another channel from the hollow in the charcoal to the channel in the mold. Now put your gold or silver in the charcoal, melt it with the blowpipe, adding a little borax to aid the fusion, and when the metal runs into a clear shining molten globe, tilt the mold Fig. 132. so that the metal runs in. Let it cool, and the task is complete. Casting in Sand . — For this work you will need a pair of casting flasks, fine casting sand or loam, some black lead and French chalk in powder, and a mus- lin bag full of pea-flour to dust over the patterns and the surfaces of the mold. Casting flasks are two equal-sized frames 196 of cast-iron, one of which has flanges Casting carrying pegs which fit into holes in cor- responding flanges on the other frame. The first is called the peg side, the second the eye side. Lay the eye side flange downward on a perfectly flat, smooth board. Within this, rather near to the funnel-shaped entrance to the flask, the pattern will afterward be laid. We will suppose it to be a piece of relief work with a flat back. It should be well rubbed over with black lead, so that the sand may not stick to it. Now take some handfuls of the molding- sand and loam, wet the mixture with water sprinkled over it, just enough being used to make the loam bind. When you have mixed loam and sand thoroughly, press it down and beat it well into the mold with a mallet. Strike the upper surface level with a straight-edge, and, having placed a bit of board upon the mold, turn it over eye side upward. Dust the surface of the mold with finely powdered brick dust. This is to prevent the two surfaces of the mold from sticking together. Lay the pattern, which must be well brushed over with black lead, upon the surface of the mold on the center line, but not too near ,197 Casting the opening into the mold. If the pat- tern is placed too near the opening the weight of metal above the pattern will not be sufficient when it is being poured in to force the liquid metal into all the crevices of the matrix. On the other hand, it must not be too far away or it may take more metal than you happen to have at your disposal. Take the pattern, press it half-way into the mold, dust the whole surface of the pattern and the mold with fine brick dust. Now place the peg side in position, press the loam very carefully in by hand, and then beat it well in with the mallet. Take the peg side off, blow away loose particles of sand from each side, and very carefully remove the pattern. The mold must now be dusted with powdered charcoal or pea-flour, or smoked with a burning taper, and the pattern once more placed in position, the two halves pressed firmly together, so as to take the final impression of the pattern. Loosen the sand over the pattern with a knife, and then drive it home again with re- peated blows with the mallet. Remove the pattern, make the pour and a few air-channels leading away from any promi- nent part of the pattern, so that the 198 air can escape when driven out by the inrush of the molten metal. The molds should now be put over a gas-burner to dry, which must be done very thoroughly. When it is quite dry melt your metal in a good-sized crucible, and while the mold is warm pour the metal quickly in. The casting when cool can be filed up and chased as much as you wish. The methods just described are only useful for comparatively rough work to be afterward chased. When a fine sur- faced cast is required, or when there is much detail in the model, the molds must be made as described in chapters XXXI. and XXXII. Molds for simple objects may be made of slate, steatite, or bath brick. The forms desired can very easily be hollowed out of any of these materials. Bath brick, how- ever, will only serve for a few casts, while the others will last for a long time. There are several interesting specimens of these molds, with examples of the work pro- duced by them, in the medieval room of the British Museum. Casting 199 CHAPTER XXIV Enamel Work Enamel Work — General Considerations — Requisites — Cloisonne Work — Filling the Cells — Mount- ing the Enamel — Champleve Enamel — The Tools — Use of Gold Solder — Limoges Enamel — Net- work Enamel — Setting the Enamel — Deep-cut Enamel The use of enamel in jewelry is to add richness and color. It should not be used in large masses or the effect will be heavy, and the most valuable quality of enamel, which is preciousness, will be lost. The colors used should be pure and brilliant and few in number. As a general rule each color should be sepa- rated from its neighbor by a line of metal, and be also bordered by a line of metal. That is to say, where the enamel is used to decorate a surface it should be enclosed in cells, made either by cutting them out of the surface with gravers and scorpers, or by raising the walls of the cells from the back, or by soldering flattened wire bent to shape edgewise to form the cell walls or cloisons : the cloisons form a kind of network which encloses the enamel in its meshes and carries the metal con- 200 struction through the design. The color and sheen of the metal outline harmonize the different colors with each other, and give a greater brilliancy of effect than can be obtained by any other means. The color of the metal, in fact, is a valuable ground tint. The limitations of this method are great, but in those very limitations lies the strength of the student. The scheme must be completely thought out, the outline must be clear, and the color clean and pure. Nothing can be left to chance. Many valuable hints can be gained by a careful study of Indian enamel work ; that of Jeypore in particular is full of suggest- iveness and beauty. Enamel may be used as a background for set stones, or an effect of color made the motive of a design, but in all cases care should be taken to secure a clear metal outline. For translucent enamel pictures themetal outline can not of course be used ; but in this case the whole picture should be small enough to set as a jewel. The burnished edge of the setting then takes the place of the metal outline. Large plaques of enamel are unsuitable for personal ornament. If enamel is to be used on small figure subjects, the figures 201 Enamel Work Enamel should either be beaten up in the round Work from sheet, or carved out of solid metal. Enamel rarely stands on cast work, partly because of the inequality of texture of the metal, and partly because the metal is so full of minute air-holes. It will hold for a time, especially if soft ; but sooner or later will fly off in the form of tiny flakes. This can in some measure be prevented by stabbing the ground of the enamel with a sharp graver, so that little points of metal are left sticking up all over the surface. These hold the enamel fairly well, but you can never be sure that it will not flake off just where it will most be seen. The best grounds for enamel are fine alloy copper, fine silver, fine gold, and 22-carat gold. The various methods of enameling will probably be familiar to most students, through Mr. Cunynghame’s recent work on the subject. It will therefore be un- necessary to do more than to treat each process briefly, and refer those who may desire fuller information to that work. Requisites The following things will be found useful : — A china mortar and pestle. A small agate mortar and pestle. 202 A nest of covered palettes as used for water-colors. A slab of ground glass about 12 inches square. A large rounded hematite burnisher. A few wide-mouthed glass bottles with corks, to hold the enamels. A few pieces of sheet iron. Some bind- ing-wire. A corundum file. A small flask of hydrofluoric acid. A 6-inch dipping-tube, made of £-inch tube, to use with this acid. A lead trough made by bending up the sides of a square of rolled sheet-lead— that at 5 lbs. to the foot will do. A good strong painter's palette-knife. A long-handled pair of tongs. A muffle-furnace, or, for small work, a crucible. Cloisonne. —How to make a Brooch in Cloisonne Enamel . — -Take a piece of 22-carat gold, size 4, the size of a shilling, and with a good-sized burnisher rub it into a very flat dome. Draw a piece of gold-wire through an oblong-holed draw-plate until it is about size 10. Bend it into a ring a little smaller than the disk. Solder the ends of the wire together in the flame with 203 Enamel Work I Enamel t 8-carat solder. Make both disk and ring Work clean, and solder the ring so that it makes a rim to the plate. Have ready some flattened gold wire, drawn several sizes smaller than the first, and having decided on your design, bend the wire edgewise into the shape required ; dip it into borax water, and place it in position. Get a sec- tion of the design done in this way, then charge the work with snippets of 1 8-carat solder and tack the wires in their places. It is not necessary to flush the joints fully. Boil the work out and proceed until the panel is complete (fig. 133). Some enamelers do not solder the cloi- sons, but if they are not soldered, when the enamel is fired again the cloisons may float about and get out of place. Still if the gold back is thick, and a few of the main cloisons and the outer ring are sol- dered, the remainder can well be left to be fixed by the melting of the enamel. Now, having chosen your enamel, sup- pose opal for the ground, green for the leaves, blue for the dividing rays ; grind up each color separately in the small agate mortar, and when it is like fine sand, wash away the milky portion of the en- amel by pouring clean water over it until 204 Enamel Work 2°5 Enamel the residue is clear, sparkling, and crystal- Work line. Now, with a small spatula fill each cell or cloison with the proper color, taking care that no grains of color get into neighboring cells. Drain away the superfluous water with bits of clean blot- ting-paper, fill the other cells, and dry them in like manner. You will now make a support out of a square of thin sheet- iron, having the center bossed up to fit the underside of the brooch. Paint this over with loam or whitening and water with a little borax added. When it is dry, place the work upon the support, and having dried the enamel on an iron plate heated by a spirit lamp or a Bunsen burner, place it in the muffle for about a minute until the enamel fuses. Take it out, and boil in dilute acid to remove the dark scale of oxide which has formed on the surface. You will find that the enamel on fusing has greatly shrunk in volume ; refill the cells with the same enamels as before and refire, repeating the process until the cells are full. When this happens, smooth the whole surface with a corundum file and water, wash the grit away with a little hydrofluoric acid and water (use India-rubber finger-stalls for this work, and 20 6 take care not to get any of the acid on your flesh). You can now fire the work again, just enough to glaze the surface, and after picking away the scale of oxid, polish it with putty on a soft buff. Make a frame and a setting for it out of 20 or 22-carat gold — the frame would be a piece of flat wire or a strip of No. 7 gage bent round flatwise into a flat ring and soldered. On this you will fix the thin band, size No. 3 or 4, to fit the enamel panel. In the angle between the edge of the flat ring and the upright face of the setting you may solder a row of small grains alter- nately with lengths of plain wire thus »■«>' m 1 1 11 — o • • o • • • « o • > o or double rows of right and left hand twist in short lengths, with small half-domes of thin gold soldered on at intervals. The catch and joint can now be made of 18- carat gold, and a pin out of 9-carat gold. When the frame and pin have been polished, the enamel center can be set and the edge burnished over evenly all round. It is quite possible to solder the ring which takes the joint and catch on the back of the brooch before the cloisons are soldered on. The joints and the soldered 207 Enamel Work Enamel Work rim are protected from the heat by whiten- ing or loam; the whole thing is then put in the furnace. Great care, however, is needed lest the joint or catch should drop off in the muffle. The latter way is the simpler looking, and the possibility of an imperfect setting is avoided. The brooch can also be made in fine silver, but if the last-named method is used for the catch it must be soldered with 1 8 -carat gold solder ; silver solder eats holes in the metal when heated in the muffle. Champleve Enamel — How to Make a Buckle in Enamel .— Take a piece of fine silver, size 15, and mark out upon it the size of the buckle. Dome the center slightly, and make a flattened border round the dome (fig. 134). The pattern you devise had better be a simple one for the first attempt. That given above you will probably find fairly simple to cut and yet elaborate enough to give you plenty of opportunity for arrangements of color. Before setting to work on the silver it will be well to make one or two trials on copper. Fix the metal either on an en- graver's block with cement or on an ordinary pitch-block, or, if the work be small enough, on an engraving stick. 14 209 Enamel Work Enamel Work Have ready a few scorpers of different sizes and shapes (see figs. 135, 136), flat, half-round, and pointed, and a good oil stone. Hold the scorper blade between the thumb and forefinger, and the handle in the hollow of the palm. The point of the tool is guided by the thumb, and driven by the pressure of the palm. A little practise, or a few moments' in- struction from a practical engraver, will soon put you in the right way. First wet the tip of the tool, make a sloping cut round the borders of the parts to be sunk, the deepest part of the cut being next the outline and a little within it, then remove the central por- tions with a half-round scorper; then take a straight scorper, and go all over the ground with a rocking side-to-side motion of the tool, making a zigzag cut thus i . This roughens the ground, and makes the enamel hold 210 better than on a smooth surface. If trans- Enamel lucent enamels are used, however, this sur- Work face has a mechanical look which is rather objectionable, and if the sides of each cell are slightly undercut the enamel will hold quite well. When you have got the whole Fig. 136. pattern cleanly cut you can now fix the bars which are to carry the belt, and solder them firmly with 1 8-carat gold solder, or with a specially hard alloy of silver and copper composed of— 21 1 Enamel Work Fine silver Fine copper oz. i o dwt. grs. O O 5 o If the latter is used the soldered portions must be carefully protected from the heat of the furnace by loam and whitening or plaster of Paris and borax. When the soldering is done you must go over the work again with a flat scorper, and remove the white skin or “ boil ” produced by the pickle. If this is not done the enamel will not hold. The next thing is the enameling. The best colors for silver are blues, greens, purples, and opal. A good scheme for this buckle would be deep but not dark blue, rich apple green, and opal and dark green in the outer border. Grind the enamels as before described, but not too finely. The coarser you can use the enamel the better the color; wash each clear of milkiness, and fill every cell with its proper color ; dry the work, and fire in the muffle on a cradle of sheet-iron made to fit the back of the buckle, or in a crucible with a cover, using a blowpipe and foot-bellows. Greater brilliancy can be 212 obtained by usingclear flux as the first layer, and adding the colors only after the first firing ; or in some of the cells a ground of flux can be laid, and bits of gold foil, pricked full of holes (with a bunch of fine needles set in a cork), can be laid on the flux, covered over first with a thin layer of flux and then with a thin layer of green or a fine red. The cells will need refilling and refiring until they are full. The sur- face can now be filed smooth with a 8 co- rundum file, washed in hydrofluoric and water, refired, and the whole afterward pol- ished with rouge. How to Make a Pendant in Limoges Enamels.-— Take a piece of thin Swedish or 9 French copper of the size required. With a burnisher rub it into a slight dome shape, and turn up the edge very slightly all round by burnishing it over the edge of a round-peened hammer fixed in a vise. Next pickle it in dilute nitric acid until the metal is perfectly clean. Paint the back of the plate with gum tragacanth and water, and sprinkle the dry waste enamel which results from the washings over the back from a pepper-pot or tea- strainer ; shake off the superfluous enamel, and let it dry. Now take the color you 213 Enamel Work Enamel have selected for the foundation, grind Wof k it and wash clean, put it in a china-color saucer, mix a tiny drop of tragacanth with the enamel, and dab it over the face of the plaque with a brush. When the whole surface is evenly covered, take away any superfluous moisture with a bit of blotting- paper or a piece of clean, dry, old linen rag. Press the enamel down evenly and smoothly all over with a stiff palette-knife. Have ready an iron cradle or support domed to fit the underside of the plaque, and painted with loam or whitening as before described ; dry the enamel over the spirit lamp, and fire in the muffle or in the crucible until the surface is smooth enough to reflect the palette-knife when held over it. Take it out, let it cool slowly, and when cold repair any faults in the surface by cleaning the metal in pickle and by rubbing down with a corundum file. Wash the surface clean, repair the holes with fresh enamel, and refire. You will now take some silver foil, prick it all over with the needle, and cut out leaves, as many as you need, and a piece of gold foil large enough for the rose ; fix them in their places on the plaque with a little tragacanth, cover each with a thin layer of flux, and fire it. Now 214 cover each leaf thinly with green, and the rose with red enamel. You can get the effect of slight modeling by laying the enamel on the rose thicker at the top of the petals than at the bottom, but it must not be too thick or it will flake off The spray can now be outlined carefully and firmly with a fine-pointed miniature brush and shell gold. This outline can be fixed by being fired. It must not be fired too much, or the particles of gold will sink into the enamel and the outline disappear. The work can now be set either as a pendant, as a panel in a necklace, or a center for a buckle or clasp. How to Make Network Enamels or Plique a Jour . — In this method the enamel when finished has no ground, but is supported by a metal network within the substance of the enamel. Get a flat sheet of aluminum bronze or platinum about io gage, and burnish the surface quite bright. This is to form the temporary ground. Next take a piece of stout silver or gold wire, and bend it into the shape of the enclosing line of this proposed panel. Next take some cloison wire, which you can buy, or make by drawing round wire through a draw-plate with oblong holes in 2I 5 Enamel Work Enamel it, or the wire can be drawn through a Work square hole and flattened in the rolling- mill. You can make a draw-plate out of a piece of an old flat file by heating it red hot, and driving a hardened taper steel punch of the right size through the steel. Larger holes can be made by driving the punch in still farther, or the hole can be made smaller by beating the hole down with a rounded hammer, and again driving the punch through to the required distance. Take the wire and bend it up to form the outline of the leaves, or the fish, or what- ever pattern you may wish, and solder the outlines together. Take great care to have the whole well tied together (fig. 137). The leaves should touch each other, the stems, and, where possible, the frame. The strength of the work when finished depends on the thoroughness with which this is done. You now have the skeleton design. Boil it out and scrape the sides of the cloisons bright, lay the work on the burnished plate, fill the cells with ground enamel well washed, and fire in a fairly quick heat. Let it cool gradu- ally, fill up the cells where the enamel is deficient, and refire. When all the cells 216 Enamel Work Enamel are completely full lay the work on the Work table, with the enamel upward, and give the bronze a few sharp blows, and the enamel will be released, and can be polished with emery and water, crocus and water, and finished with rouge on a buff. If you have no aluminum bronze or platinum use a sheet of copper about size 5, and when the enamel is complete paint the face over with two or three coats of varnish to protect the cloisons if they are of silver ; if they are of gold no protection is necessary. Place the whole in sulfuric acid and water — one part of the acid to one of water. The copper will be dissolved away, and when it is as thin as thin paper, can be peeled off. The enamel may then be polished as before described. If the openings in the network are small enough, i. e. about -J-th of an inch across, the above methods can be dispensed with. Hold the network panel upright, and fill in the spaces with enamel mixed with a very little gum tragacanth. When done, fix it upright on a support cut out of thin sheet-iron. Fire it quickly in a very strong fire, so that the enamel runs like water in the spaces. It must be cooled carefully, 218 and not taken away from the heat too suddenly, or the enamels may crack away from the cloisons and the effect spoilt. A panel like fig. 138 would look well in a skeleton setting, and would do either for a brooch or a pendant for a necklace. Another way is to cut out the spaces with a piercing-saw, leaving the cloisons slightly thicker, and filing them down afterward. This does away with the need of sol- der, but it is more labori- ous, and the result lacks the freedom Fig * ! 3 8 * and life of the methods just described. How to do an Intaglio or Beep-Cut Enamel . — In this work the forms are carved or modeled below the surface of the metal, at the bottom of a shallow pit, as it were. The pit is afterward filled up with enamel, fired, and then ground and polished level with the surface of the metal. Where the carving is deepest the enamel is darkest in color, and vice versa . Having decided on your design, suppose a leaf pattern as at A (fig. 137), take a piece of hardish modeling-wax and make a model in very 219 Enamel Work Enamel low relief. When the outline is clean, and Wor k definitely expresses your intention, make a mold from it in the finest plaster of This will give you a good idea of the depth of your cutting. Copy this in silver or copper— the metal should not be less than 16 gage, or you will soon cut through to the other side. Fix a piece of the metal, cut nearly to the size and shape you require, on an engraving stick or on a pitch-block, and with a spit-stick outline the design ; then cut the design deeply round the edges within this line. Thus, if for a leaf, the cross-section of your cutting would be thus \v/. The stalks would be deep grooves, and the flowers carved to suggest them as nearly as possible. The sides of the sinkings must be kept upright , if they have become irregular, they Fig 139 can trued up with a justifier, which is a scorper ground with two cutting edges at an angle to each other as in fig. 139. B and C are the cutting edges. When the modeling is as complete as you can make it, and the surface of it every- where bright, put the enamel in and press 220 Paris. it down ; when fired, and the enamel filed and polished, the relief is, as it were, trans- lated into a shaded drawing in color. If you do figure-work, the faces, hands, and feet can be left in metal and afterward engraved in line, the backgrounds and draperies alone being deep cut and enam- eled. An etcher’s dry-point is useful for fine work in the hair and features. The lines of the engraving can be afterward filled in with etching-ball or thick black paint or shoemaker’s heel-ball. Small figure-panels in raised gold or silver can be produced by first doing the work in ordinary gesso on a piece of smooth, hard wood. Fine silver or fine gold, rolled to the thinness of common note-paper, is then annealed, and burnished over the relief in the same way that a schoolboy makes the foil copies of a shil- ling. When the metal impression is as complete as the gesso original it can be fixed on the pitch-block, and the modeling carried still farther with pointed bur- nishers. This, when enameled back and front, can be set in a frame and fixed in a bracelet or a pendant. Panels for altar-crosses, candlesticks, etc., can be so produced. They can be strengthened 221 Enamel Work Enamel by backing with cement composition. Work Make the wall of the setting which is to enclose them •§• or J inch deeper than would be necessary for the enamel itself. When everything is ready for setting the enamels, melt some rosin in a pipkin, and add to it about half its bulk of plaster of Paris or powdered whitening ; stir it well, pour it into the setting, warm the enamel slightly, and press it into its place ; and when cold, burnish the edge of the setting carefully over the enamel and clean it with methylated spirit and a soft rag. Almost any composition with a resinous base which sets hard would, however, serve the purpose equally well. Figures in higher relief can be done by taking a cast in type-metal from a model in wax. The thin metal is then rubbed and bur- nished over the type-metal and frequently annealed during the process. Or the reverse of the model may be cast in type- metal or pewter, and the thin gold or silver rubbed into it. This, of course, can not be done if there is much under- cutting. 222 CHAPTER XXV Hinges for Casket — -Drawing the Tube — The Man- drel— The Liner — The Joint Tool — Soldering the Joints — The Pin Take a strip of metal, say size 6, thrice wider than the diameter of the proposed hinge. Suppose the hinge to be -J-th of an inch in diameter, the width of the strip of metal would be -§. Mark this off the sheet with the dividers, running one leg of the dividers down the edge as a guide (fig. 140). Snip off the angles at one end of the strip as shown in fig. 141. This is to make the end taper, so that it will slip into the hole in the draw-plate. Now fix in the vise a block of wood one inch wide in which you have made a few graduated semicircular notches (fig. 142), and with the end of the hammer beat the strip of metal into a hollow gutter lengthwise (fig. 143). Bend it still farther round at one end until it is a rough tube-shape (fig. 144), and anneal it in the fire or blowpipe flame. While it is still hot rub it over inside and out with a little bees- wax. Take a steel mandrel, which is a 223 Hinges for Casket Hinges for length of polished steel wire, as thick as Casket the inside of the proposed tube, file the Fig. 140. end taper (see fig. 145). Place the taper end in the rough tube, and squeeze the 224 metal round the mandrel at the end (fig. 146). Now fix the draw-plate in the vise, slip mandrel and tube together through a suitable hole in the draw-plate, and draw them by hand through successive holes until the metal becomes a tube which nearly fits the mandrel. Now place the draw-plate on the draw-bench, and draw the tube and mandrel together until the latter fits fairly tightly. Now put the reverse end of the mandrel into a hole in the plate which exactly fits it, and draw it out either by hand or with the draw-bench. The tube is now com- plete. It can be made still smaller if necessary by drawing it through the holes in the plate without the mandrel. In like manner draw another tube a little larger in diameter, so that the tube first made will just fit inside. Anneal both tubes ; saw the large tube in two halves lengthwise, and take two strips of metal as wide as the edge of the casket and as long, and solder a half tube to each (fig. 147). File away the outside 15 225 Fig. 141. Hinges for Casket Fig. 142. quarter of each semicircle (figs. 148 and Hinges for 149) to allow for the lid to open. Divide Casket the length of the casket into an unequal number of small spaces from \ inch to one inch, accord- ing to the greater or less length of the hinge ; cut the smaller tube into cor- responding lengths, and file the joints flat in the joint-tool (fig. 150). Fit the two halves of the hinge together, and lay the short lengths of tube along the groove close together (fig. 149), and with a small panel of solder tack the alter- nate lengths to one side of the hinge (see fig. 1 51), taking care not to run the solder into the joints between the tubes. Take the two halves apart, andsoundly solder each length of tube in its place. Do not forget to clean the work in pickle after each soldering. The hinge is 227 Fig. 150. Hinges for now ready for the pin, which may be a piece Casket Q f brass wire drawn to the proper size and slipped into place. The pin must not, however, be fixed until the casket is other- wise complete. The work may now be filed up clean, made true, and each half carefully fitted and soldered into its place on the lid of the box. CHAPTER XXVI Moldings — The Swage-Block — Filing the Grooves — Drawing the Metal Moldings For this you will need a swage-block (see fig. 152) with movable dies (see figs. 153 and 154). In the upper surface of one of the dies file a groove of the shape of the molding you require as in fig. 153. The groove must be trumpet-shaped, the smaller end being the exact section you wish the molding to be. This must be done 228 Moldings Moldings with great care, as the smallest mark will show on the molding. Now cut a strip of metal slightly thicker and wider than the proposed molding. Having annealed it, pass one end through the groove you have made in the swage- block, and screw the plain block down so as to press slightly on the metal. Now fix the swage-block in the vise, take the draw- tongs and pull the strip through with a steady movement. Pass the strip through the swage again and turn the screw slightly, pressing the metal more close- ly into the mold. Repeat this, annealing the metal from time to time until you have made the molding as complete and as thin as you wish. By modifying the section of the groove in the swage, and by filing the lower sur- 230 face of the upper swage-block, hollow moldings of almost any section can be produced, provided, of course, that no part is undercut. CHAPTER XXVII Polishing — Materials Required — Polishing Silver Work — A Simpler Method-— Burnishing — Polishing Gold Work — Care of Polishing Waste — Cleanli- ness of Tools The materials required will be polishing sticks, which are flat strips of wood covered on one side with chamois leather — one for use with oil and pumice and one for rouge and water. A ring-stick, a round, tapering leather-covered rod of wood, will be found useful for polishing the insides of rings. A few mops, scratch-brushes, and a leather buff, together with pumice-stone, rotten- stone, crocus, sticks of charcoal, and a small quantity of jeweler's rouge, will complete what is necessary for most kinds of polishing. Polishing Silver IV or k . — Silver work is polished in several ways according to the degree of luster desired. For a very brilliant polish the method 231 Moldings Polishing Polishing is as follows After the work has been pickled or boiled out clean in dilute acid, the whole visible surface is carefully stoned over with sticks of Water of Ayr stone, working with a circular motion to avoid scratching or grooving the metal. Internal angles, narrow grooves, and shallow lines, are stoned with thin slips of slate. The work must be wiped clean from time to time to see that the surface is being evenly polished. The object of stoning is the removal of the film of oxid produced by heat, and all marks of the tools and files. The surface is next more finely polished with charcoal and oil ; you can add a little crocus to hasten the process if you wish. This done, polish again with fine rotten- stone and oil, taking care in each process to avoid lines, scratches, or marks of any kind. The final polish is given with jew- eler's rouge and water, and the work washed in hot soap and water to remove all traces of grease. This process is labo- rious, but the result, when properly car- ried out, is most brilliant. A more rapid method, used for ordinary work or for polishing repousse, is as fol- lows : — The work is stoned as before and then scratch-brushed on the lathe, and 232 sprinkled from time to time with stale beer. Polishing Moldings, bosses, ribs, or projections from the surface can be brightened still further by burnishing with a smooth burnisher. A little soap and water used with the tool makes it work more easily. I ndian workers simplify the process still further. The surface of the metal, after being carefully whitened in pickle, is scraped over with the scraper, and afterward vigorously bur- nished with agate and hematite burnishers ; but unless both scraping and burnishing are most carefully done, the work, as might be expected, will look rough and unfinished. Polishing Gold PPork . — The process of polishing gold work is very similar to that first described for silver. The work is boiled out as before and stoned. Then put a little finely powdered pumice into a shallow vessel, and mix it into a paste with olive oil. Take a boxwood polishing-stick —a skewer or a slip of any hard wood will do — dip the point in the oil and pumice, and rub over the whole work, cleaning out crevices, sunk lines, etc., most care- fully. If this be not done, the oxidized surface at the bottom of the hollows will remain as whitish patches scattered over 233 Polishing the otherwise polished surface with a dis- figuring effect. In time this defect is removed, the hollows get filled with dirt, and the work looks more interesting. It is better not to rely on the result of time ; besides, the reflected light from the bottom of the hollows when polished often makes the work look richer and more full of color. When you have gone over the whole surface with the oil and pumice, the proc- ess is continued with oil and crocus, and completed with rouge and water. In the case of both gold and silver work, the polishings and scourings of the metal should always be kept and refined to recover the precious metal which has been removed in the process. The burnishers, mops, and polishing-brushes must all be kept perfectly clean and free from dust. Unless this be done, the work may be scratched and spoiled when most near completion. The burnishers should be occasionally polished on the buff, and kept wrapped up in chamois leather when not in use. 234 CHAPTER XXVIII Coloring, Darkening, or Oxidizing Silver and Gold Work — Materials Required — Darkening Gold — Coloring Copper Silver work, when newly whitened and Coloring, polished, always looks unpleasantly white Darkening, and glaring. Time will always remedy ° r Si ^ d ^ g this, but the process can be hastened. This Gold Work can be done by oxidizing the surface with any of the compounds of sulfur. The work may be exposed to the fumes of sulfur, or it may be washed with solutions of any of the chemical compounds of sulfur, such as potassium sulfid, am- monium sulfid, barium sulfid, etc. The ammonium sulfid is what is most gen- erally used, and it gives a range of color to polished silver, varying from pale golden straw through deep crimson to purple and bluish black. The depth of the color de- pends on the strength of the solution and the length of time the metal is exposed to its action. The simplest way of applying it is to make a hot solution of the ammonium sulfid — not too strong, a pale straw color 235 Coloring, will give about the proper strength. Do Darkening, this in the open air if possible, as the odor disengaged is most offensive ; then brush Gold Work a th e solution over the work you desire to darken. Watch closely until you perceive the color you wish for, then swiftly wash the work in clean water, and dry it. If the surface be now rubbed gently with a chamois leather the film of oxid is removed from the projecting por- tions of the work, giving it a much richer, older appearance. The chemical must not be allowed to penetrate behind settings or the brilliancy of the stones will be spoiled. Neither should it be allowed to remain on the hands or they will be badly stained. Alloyed gold can be darkened in the same way, only it is necessary to warm the metal until it is almost too hot to handle or the sulfid will not act upon it. Gold of 9, 12, 15 carat can be darkened by heat alone, and often takes the most beautiful shade of purple if the heating is arrested at the right moment. Copper can be darkened either by the ammonium sulfid or by heat, and if brushed over while warm with a stiff brush and a very little pure beeswax will 236 keep its luster and color unchanged for a long time. In gold work of any intricacy it is often difficult and sometimes impos- sible to polish the inner portions of the ornament, and when finished the work looks unpleasant and incomplete. This difficulty can be obviated by first slightly gilding the whole work, and then polishing it in the ordinary way. A recipe for this is given at the end of the book. CHAPTER XXIX Methods of Gilding — Mercury Gilding — Cold Gilding Mercury gilding is done by means of an amalgam of gold with mercury. It is the oldest way of gilding, and is still the best, because the gold is carried into the surface of the metal, and is not merely a thin skin more or less adherent. Take 8 parts of mercury and one part of fine gold. Put the gold into a small crucible and heat it on the forge with a blowpipe, and when the crucible reddens pour in the mercury, and stir it into the gold with an iron rod until you have a pasty mass. Empty the crucible into a 237 Coloring, Darkening, or Oxidizing Silver and Gold Work Gilding Gilding bowl of clean water, and wash the amal- gam carefully by kneading it with the thumb and finger against the sides of the vessel. This is to get rid of the excess of mercury. Then take the amalgam, place it in a bit of chamois leather, and squeeze out the remainder of the uncombined mercury. Because this excess of mercury contains a portion of gold it should be kept separate, and used when you wish to make amalgam again. Next dissolve mercury in pure nitric acid in the proportion of io parts of mer- cury to ii of nitric acid ; dilute the solu- tion with 20 times its mass of water, shake the mixture well, and keep it in a stop- pered bottle for use. Boil out the objects you wish to solder, and remove all grease with hot soda, and dip the work in the solution of nitrate of mercury. Take a small scratch-brush of brass wire, dip it first in the solution, and then take up a small portion of the amal- gam, and spread it carefully and evenly over the whole surface to be gilded. Some workers mix the amalgam and the nitrate of mercury together, and dip the object to be gilded in the mixture. The first method is probably less wasteful. 238 Then hold the work over a charcoal Gilding brazier placed in a fireplace with a glass screen across the opening. This enables you to see the progress of the evaporation without the danger of inhaling the vapor of mercury. The work should not be laid on the coals, but in an iron pan or on an iron plate over the coals. When the mercury has evaporated rub the object with a soft brush, and polish with the scratch-brush and a little stale beer, or with rouge and water on the buff. If the work appears spotty, drop a little strong nitric acid on the spots, afterward plunge the whole object in weak pickle (5 of water to one of acid), and then touch the defect- ive portions with fresh amalgam, and evap- orate as before. Another method is to soak linen rags in a solution of chloride of gold. Dry and burn the rags, carefully preserving the ashes. Thoroughly clean the object you wish to gild, and rub the ashes with a bit of damp leather over the surface. Continue this until you see the gold-color appear ; then wash the object well, and burnish the surface with a highly polished burnisher. The washings and every particle of the ashes should be carefully kept because they 239 Gilding Shaping and Cutting Precious Stones contain minute quantities of gold which can all be recovered when desired. Other methods are given in the Appendix. CHAPTER XXX A Method of Shaping and Cutting the Softer Precious Stones — The Stones most easily Cut — The Cements Required — Drilling Stone — The En- graver’ s Lathe — Polishing The softer precious stones, such as moon- stones, opals, chrysoprase, peridot, and turquoise, may be shaped either with the corundum file and water, or with emery- wheels fixed on a polishing-spindle. In the latter case it will be necessary to have a water-can, with a tiny tap soldered in the bottom, hung over the emery-wheel in such a way that a drop of water may fall on the wheel at frequent intervals while you are grinding. To protect your- self from being splashed, you will need a metal catch-pan, which will collect the drip and the water which flies from the wheel. The stone to be shaped must be fixed on the end of a rod of wood about as thick as a pencil and 8 inches long. Many people use cane for this purpose ; being flexible, it is less likely to jar the 240 stone when the latter is pressed against the Shaping and wheel ; but a piece of common fire-wood will Cutting do just as well. Warm a lump of ordinary Precious graver’s cement, and mold it on the end ones of the stick with a wetted finger to a roughly conical shape (fig. 155). Warm the end again, and press the stone, also slightly warmed, into the end of the cement, and mold the cement closely round it with the finger. When cool, the stone can be pressed against the wheel and shaped to whatever form you please. A fine surface can be given on a wheel of finer grain and the stone polished on a leather buff with fine emery and water, finish- ing up on another buff with putty powder and water. If the stone is very tender, as, for example, opals often are, it may be well to use what is called soft cement for fixing the stone to the polishing-stick. This is made of finely sifted wood ashes, well 16 241 Precious Stones Shaping and kneaded into melted suet until the re- Cutting quired consistency is obtained. Stones can be slit by using a bow made out of a tapered rod of ash about 2 feet long strung with iron wire. The wire is fastened 4 inches away from the butt, so that the latter may be used as a handle. This wire, anointed with emery, is used as a saw. Much patience is needed, as it cuts very slowly. A quicker result is ob- tained by cutting out a disk of soft iron and using it as a circular saw, with oil and emery. A lapidary’s slitter is merely a larger disk used horizontally. The defect of the small iron disk is that it is difficult to get a clean cut with it. Still, for cutting turquoise or opal matrix it does well enough, if worked steadily and with patience. The stone to be slit should be cemented to a block of wood instead of a stick, and the block firmly secured to the table of the polishing-lathe, yet in such a way that it may be pressed gradually against the edge of the wheel as the latter slowly cuts its way through the stone. It is useless to attempt to hasten the process. The least hurry may easily ruin a good stone. The advantage of the methods just described is that they 242 Precious Stones are within the reach of any one, and with Shaping and care can be made to produce very good Cutting results. It must be remembered that native workers in the East do their work with tools even more rudimentary than these. For drilling stones, a drilling or seal- engraver’s lathe-head will be needed, as it is important that the drill should revolve with great speed and steadiness. This lathe-head is a simple pillar of iron or brass, with a small wheel revolving in a slot. The axle of the wheel is a steel tube working in tin bearings. The drills and cutting tools are fixed in this tube with melted tin or lead. The drills them- selves are small tubes of iron, and the cut is given by means of diamond dust. Small rods, with variously shaped ends, taper knobs of different sizes, and tiny wheels, are used, with diamond dust to give a cutting surface, in engraving seals. By using small wheels of thick copper screwed on the spindle of the polishing- lathe, some of the harder stones can be shaped with oil and emery, and polished on similar wheels of tin, the final polish- ing being done on wheels of wood or with fine emery, followed by leather and H3 Shaping and Cutting Precious Stones Piece - Molding putty powder ; but, if any considerable amount of work is required, it is better to get hold of an intelligent lapidary, who will cut the stones for you much more quickly than you could. CHAPTER XXXI Piece-Molding — The Model — The Casting-Flasks — The Sand — Filling the Flasks — Making the Mold — The Charcoal — The False Cores — The Back Mold — The Core of the Model — Arran- ging the Gates — Drying the Mold Work that is undercut, or in any way complicated, can only be cast by piece- molding or by the waste-wax process. Suppose it necessary, for example, to make a piece-mold cast of the symbol of St. Luke designed as one of the feet of a cross or candlestick. First make your model in wax or clay, and take a cast of it in plaster of Paris. Next take a pair of cast- ing-flasks, large enough to hold the model and give plenty of room for the pour of the metal. Lay the lower or eye portion of the flask on a flat board, and fill it with fine casting-sand made very slightly moist. The sand must be such as will bind well under pressure. Hampstead sand, which 244 is naturally mixed with a small quantity of fine loam, is very useful for this pur- pose. The sand must be well rammed with a mallet into the flask, and great care should be taken to compress the sand well against the sides of the flask, or it may drop out when the mold is turned over. This done, strike off the excess of material with a straight-edge, and adding a few more handfuls of sand, lay a stout board on the top, and dri/e the sand well in by evenly distributed blows of a mallet. Again strike off the superfluous sand, and lay the model to be cast well within the flask, so that when you make the spout or pour for the metal there may be a good weight of metal above the model. Yet it must not be too far away or you will be in danger of getting a spongy cast, because the metal will have cooled in its passage into the mold. Having fixed the posi- tion of the model, take a metal spatula or modeling-tool and excavate a hollow in the sand just large enough to receive half the thickness of the model ; lay the model on its back in the hollow, and with some very fine sand fill in under- neath the model, so that every part of it 245 Piece- Molding Piece- is well supported — until, in fact, you have Molding taken a partial impression of the surface. Now dust some finely powdered brick-dust from a rough canvas bag— a bag made of sacking or nailcloth will do perfectly well for this ; with a camel’s-hair mop, such as gilders use, brush this well into the surface, F and blow away all that does not now ad- here. You will now proceed to make the false cores. These are movable portions of the molds so arranged as to avoid the undercutting (fig. 156). Again dust the model Awith a little finely powdered French chalk, and brush the superfluity away with the camebs-hair mop, and, taking a little 246 fine sand, press it carefully with the fingers Piece - into the interstices of the form, and build Molding the sand up into a block with sloping sides (see fig. 156, B). With a small mal- let tap the sand all over evenly, both to drive it home and also to consolidate and shape it. Then with the flat steel spatula or modeling-tool cut away the sand along the line you have chosen for the seam (see fig. 156, F), pare the surface of the block 247 Piece- into a regular and even shape. Now stick Molding a fork made of two thick strong needles or pointed wires inserted in a slip of hard wood (see fig. 158) into the block, and having laid the flask on a flat board, tap the under side of the board smartly, but not too vigorously, until you see that the core has separated slightly from the model, lift it carefully away, and dust the molded surface with finely powdered Fig. 158. charcoal from a coarse muslin bag, and replace the core on the mold; tap it gently but firmly home again. Proceed in like manner with the opposite side of the model (see fig. 156,0). You will now have to make the mold for the upper part of the head. This you will do in the back-mold, which will be made in the peg half of the flask (see figs. 1 56, D, and 1 57). Place this upper half of the flask in position. Having 248 dusted the whole upper surface of the false cores and the under mold, press some of the finest sand over the top of the head of the model, and then fill the whole mold with ordinary casting-sand and ram it well into place with the mallet handle and afterward with the head of the mal- let. Strike off the superfluity as before, and as before again pile on sand and drive it down with the flat board and the mal- let. Now lift the peg half away, and you will have the impression of the false cores (fig. 156, D, shows the section of the back-mold) and also a mold of the top of the animal’s head, thus completing one- half of the mold. Now dust charcoal over the impression of the head and re- place the upper half of the flask. Care- fully turn the whole mold over and lift the under half free from the model, leaving the model and the false cores resting in the upper half of the mold. With a spoon or a spatula scoop out two shallow hollows in what are now the upper faces of the false cores. This is to give a regis- ter and to enable you to place the false cores in their proper positions when the mold is taken apart (see figs. 157 and 159). Now shake out the sand which 249 Piece- Molding Fig. 159. you had previously beaten into the under mold, and replacing the frame in position on the upper flask, dust the mold over with brick-dust as before, carefully press fine sand over the back of the model, then fill in with the ordinary sand, ram it well home, and fill up the frame as before. Again lift off the mold, dust the new impression with charcoal, and replace the mold. With a knife loosen all the sand nearly down to the bottom, and again fill in and ram the mold com- pletely full. The object of this is to incorporate the sand and the charcoal fac- ing. If this be neglected the cast will be poor, because the charcoal by itself can not resist the flow of the metal. The latter carries away the fine edges and surfaces, and instead of a smooth cast you get a rough and ragged one. The mold is now complete save for the vents and the pour, if you intend to make a solid cast- ing. If you wish it to be hollow you will need a core made thus You will take a piece of iron wire, about inch diameter and 2 inches long, and place it in the mold against the upper part of the head of the bull in a little groove scratched in the surface as shown 251 Piece- Molding Piece- in the figure. Now take a longer piece of Molding thick wire, just long enough to reach nearly to the bottom of the case and to project 2 inches beyond the head of the bull. Wind it round with a length of thin copper wire to give the sand a better hold, and paint over the whole wire'with stiff* flour paste. This makes the sand adhere to the wire. Now open the mold, and, having removed the model, replace the false cores in their position, close the mold carefully, and turn it over. Lift off* the upper half, and from the opening left between the false cores fill to half its depth with fine sand the place occupied by the model. Now lay the core wire in position, and carefully fill the remaining space with the sand, pressing it into its place against the sides of the mold with a modeling-tool. Take the sand up between your thumb and finger, and use it as if it were modeling-clay, pressing it carefully into place. Now pile on a little more sand to make up that portion of the model which projected above the false cores, and press down the other half of the mold on this, so that the complete model of the bull is built up in sand around the central wire (see fig. 160). This 252 Piece- Molding Piece- done, cut away the surface of this core Molding to an even depth of nearly -J- inch. The depth of the paring fixes the thickness of the metal in the cast, and that will depend on the metal you use. For silver, it may, as above, be a little less than inch ; for bronze or brass it should be rather more than ■§-. It will now be necessary to 254 pare the other side of the core, and to do this you must turn the mold over carefully, open it, and remove the false cores with the lifting needles. When you have done this you must now make the gates, the vents, and the pour (see fig. 161). The pour is the principal funnel-shaped opening by which the metal enters the mold, the gates are the smaller openings from the pour to various parts of the mold, and the vents are open- ings or grooves arranged to let out the air when the metal fills up the mold. It is almost always best to arrange the pour so that the metal enters at the bottom of the mold, and fills it up gradually without risk to the angles and points of sand which project into the mould. Scrape a deep groove in the surface of each half of the mold, beginning at one of the holes left for that purpose in the end of the flask. You can do this with an old teaspoon Fig. 162. Piece- Molding 2 55 Piece- or a broad spatula with a rounded end (see Molding fig. 162). The mold is now complete, and needs only to be thoroughly baked near the fire, so that all moisture is driven out. CHAPTER XXXII Casting by Waste- Wax Process — The Wax Model — The Sand — Casting the Mold — Bedding the Mold in the Flasks — Casting without Flasks — Hollow Castings — A Third Method of Casting Casting by Waste- Wax Process It is often necessary to cast objects which may be either too small or too complicated for the last process, or that may require a greater delicacy of finish in the cast. Make your model in casting-wax. This is a composition of fine beeswax, resin, and Venice turpentine in the following proportions : 1 part best pure beeswax, jl^-th part fine resin, -J-th part best Venice turpentine. Melt in an earthen pot, stir well, and add a little coloring matter according to wish or necessity — Venetian red, Prussian blue, or any color which stains well without having much body in itself. If the result when cold is too sticky, re- 256 melt it, and add a little more pure wax, Casting by as there is an excess of turpentine. If it Waste- Wax becomes flaky in working add more tur- Process pentine. When worked between the thumb and finger it should draw out into long threads. Another mixture is, two parts of best Japan wax and one part white resin. This gives excellent results, but is rather sticky to work. If the object required be very small you can model it in pure Japanese wax, which can be bought any- where. Almost any wax, except paraffin wax, will do if on melting it runs away and leaves no solid residue. Having made your model, roll up a slender rod of the wax, say J to \ inch diameter, and, after warming the end of the rod, attach it to the back, bottom, or any part of the model which will not be seen ultimately. This is to make the funnel or pour. Take the finest casting- sand you can procure, mix it with a very little fine loam, and dry it thoroughly by the fire. Pound it well in a mortar with an iron pestle and roll it with a smooth wood- en roller on a smooth hard board to crush out any uneven lumps. Sift it through a canvas bag, or rub it through a fine sieve. Put a small quantity of this finely powdered 17 257 Casting by sand into a cup, and add enough water to Waste- Wax make it into a creamy liquid, and set it on Process one s '^ e t0 set tle. When the sand has partly settled to the bottom, pour off the clearer water, and, taking a soft camel’s- hair brush, paint the sand carefully over the whole surface of the model. Very little will stick on at first, but that does not matter ; put the model on one side to dry, and when dry paint on another coat. Take care that the coats are laid on evenly, and avoid bubbles or holes. If these are left they produce lumps and blots which will be certain to come in awkward places on the cast. Fill in the hollows and crev- ices first, always leaving each coat to dry perfectly before laying on another. When you have covered the whole model very carefully with, say, seven or eight coats, the last one being thoroughly dry, take a flask of suitable size, and partly fill the eye half with sand, lay the model on its face, and press the sand well under- neath it, so that the sand coating of the model is everywhere well supported, then ram the sand well in all around ; lay the peg half in place, and fill that also with well-rammed sand as before described. Now lay a board on the back and face of 258 the mold, clamp all firmly together, and Casting by place by the furnace fire to dry. When Waste- Wax dry run the wax out, and when it has all Process run away let the mold get thoroughly hot, so that the remainder of the wax in the mold disappears. Place the mold on the ground, mouth uppermost, so sup- ported that you may pour in the metal previously melted either in a crucible in the furnace or with a gas blowpipe and foot-bellows on the forge, having first piled coke around the crucible. When cool the mold can now be taken apart, the sand broken away, and the casting finished by chasing. Small work can be done without flasks. In this case the first process of painting on the sand must be continued until you have got a thickness of at least an inch of sand over every part of the model, except of course the top of the pour or gate for the metal. This mold, after being tied round for greater security with binding-wire, may be dried and used as before described. The advantages of this method of cast- ing over the ordinary process of lost wax are — ist, that it takes less time; 2d, the elaborate system of runners and risers to carry off the air in the mold is unneces- 259 Casting by Waste- Wax Process sary, the air escapes naturally through the pores of the sand; 3d, there are fewer cracks or fissures in the mold ; 4th, the mold has not to be made red-hot before pouring in the metal. By the method just described the work is cast solid. If you wish to have it hollow you must pro- ceed differently. Paint one-half of the model only with the successive layers of the sand, and leave the back entirely un- covered. When the sand is fully dry dust a little French chalk over the wax, and take a pair of flasks, and fill the eye half as described for piece-molds. Lay the model so that there will be a sufficient length of pour above it, and excavate the sand so that the uncovered half of the model may rest in it. Pack fine sand well underneath this, and place the peg half of the flask in position. Having dusted brick-dust all over the face of the mold, ram fine sand all round the model, fill the mold, and strike off clean as before. Reverse the mold, and lift off the eye half, shake out the sand, dust the model clean, and, taking pinches of fine sand, press them into the cracks and crannies of the latter. Then ram the sand well over the mold and into the sides of the flask, 260 and level the surface as before. Open the Casting by mold again, dust the impression with char- Waste- Wax coal, close the mold, and again loosen the Process sand over the model. Ram in more sand until the frame is full. Now place the mold mouth downward near the furnace, set a small vessel underneath to catch the wax. When the mold is hot and all the wax has run away, open the mold, take a length of iron wire, just long enough to traverse the whole model lengthwise and project an inch at each end, and, having coiled fine copper or iron wire round it, rub a little flour paste over it, and make a core of sand round the wire ; lay it in po- sition so that as for as possible there may be an equal space all round it. When the core is dry you can fix it in position and pour in the metal. There is yet another way of casting hollow 7 figures by the lost wax process. A matrix of the figure is made in gelatine (this part of the work is best done by a plaster molder), melted wax is painted in, and the mold is turned about every way, so that every part of the mold receives an even coating of wax. This coating should be a little more than •g- inch thick. When the wax is quite cold 261 Casting by it is taken out of the mold. You will Waste-Wax now have a hollow casting in wax, we will Process suppose, of the bull. Fix the rod of wax for the pour at the back of the model. Run a stout iron wire lengthwise through the model (see fig. 1 59). This is to carry the core. Coat the wax with the sand and water as before, and, when thick enough, bed the resulting mold in the flasks, ram the sand round the core wire, melt the wax out, and cast the figure. When cast the core can be removed bit by bit from the bottom. The iron rod, which will be firmly fixed in the cast, must also be re- moved, the hole left by it filled up with metal, and the head then chased to remove traces of the join. CHAPTER XXXIII On Inlaying On Inlaying The art of inlaying is extremely simple, and requires merely patience and a steady hand. It consists in cutting away the surface of the metal in lines and spaces bordered by undercut edges as in fig. 163. The cutting is done with scorpers, pointed ones being used for the lines and broad 262 ones for spaces. The tool is held as de- On Inlaying scribed for engraving or carving. When you have drawn the pattern on your work, and have engraved it, take fine gold or fine silver wire drawn a little larger than the thickness of the line, and laying small portions at a time in the incisions, you will tap the gold or silver gently with a small, or tapping, or riveting hammer into the incisions. The work requires much patience. The broader surfaces will be filled by pieces cut out of the Fig. 163. sheet metal, only in this case the ground of the space must be carefully roughened all over by digging the pointed scorper firmly into the metal, so that it raises points which give a key to the inlaid metal. If the surfaces are not very large, you can inlay with dentist's gold, using small rounded punches to drive the soft, spongy metal into the recesses of the engraving. Damascening is a similar process in which gold and silver are applied to the decoration of iron and steel. There are 263 On Inlaying On Old Work and Old Methods three principal methods of work. In the first the gold is hammered into spaces engraved out, which gives the best and most durable result, though naturally the most costly by far. In the next method the ground within the spaces to be covered is roughened with the point of the scorper as above, and thin gold or fine silver ham- mered on ; the points and dents made by the tool hold the gold in place. The third and cheapest way is to roughen the ground by cross lines cut with the graver and, laying gold -leaf on the space, burnish it in with the agate or blood-stone burnisher. This operation must be repeated until there is a sufficient body of gold to give the required effect. The whole work can then be brightened, polished, or finished in any way you please. CHAPTER XXXIV On Old Work and Old Methods What most impresses the student of all old work of the best periods is the clear shining sincerity of the worker and his patient skill. The worker's hand traveled 264 lovingly over every part of the work, giving it a kindliness of aspect enduringly attract- ive. More than this, it bears a touching witness to the spirit of the worker . 1 What that spirit was, the preface by the eleventh- century monk, Theophilus, to his work on “ Divers Arts,” more clearly shows us — “ Most dear brother, moved by sincere love I have not delayed to insinuate to thy mind how much honour and perfection there is in avoiding idleness, and in tramp- ling down slackness and sloth ; and how sweet and pleasant it is to be occupied in works of divers utility. In the words of a certain orator, c To know aught is a merit, it is a fault not to desire to learn/ Nor let any one delay to learn of them of whom Solomon saith, c Whoso increaseth knowl- edge increaseth work/ because the diligent in meditation can understand what growth of mind and body proceedeth thence.