Shibuishi pendant

Shibuishi is a traditional Japanese alloy, 75% copped and 25% silver.

I alloyed a piece, rolled it to 1.5mm then cut this shape out.



Forming it with hammer and stake




And soldering the back tail into a pendant loop




Now it is ready for some carving. I often go down a hill headed toward the sea after work, sometimes when the timing is right I get an amazing view of the moon rise. The shimmering on the water. No picture from my small camera can capture it properly. I'm thinking this will be the theme for this piece.

Tiaan Burger

Tiaan Burger is a South African knifemaker and artist. I had been following his work on facebook because of the mutual interest in knife making. Recently he has also started posting some traditional Japanese carving which he learnt much the same way as myself, through the Iron Brush forum and by contacting Ford Hallam. He was able to spend some time in Ford's workshop as well which is something I would dearly like to do.

I contacted Tiaan and was fortunate enough to be able to interview him when he was in Durban on holiday. I am very interested in Tiaan's work because he doesn't just take Japanese techniques and carve Japanese motifs but rather uses Japanese techniques to carve South African scenery, fauna and flora. In the interview I asked about this and he said he likes to imagine a Japanese craftsman growing up in South Africa. The Japanese used their surroundings as inspiration, so too should we.

Traditional Japanese techniques and materials applied to South African scenery and animals.

Gathering motifs from your surroundings

Translating that into the traditional form of a tsuba or Japanese sword guard

Test plate: mild steel and silver inlay

I've been wanting to try inlay as it's one of the techniques used in traditional Japanese metalwork. I cut a fairly large circle from mild steel and got to marking out a design. I chose to include an enzo as the moon. Using my v chisel and tiny hammers I outlined the design.







This is my workspace



I hollowed out a cavity to accept the silver and undercut the walls.



The silver is hollowed at the back to add surface area, that way when I hammer it flat it will spread into the undercuts.





Once it fits and is hammered in slightly, the walls are hammered down around the inlay with a flat punch. This ensures that it stays put and makes the definition between inlay and background.

Then I started shaping the silver.



The plan was to make the inlay look like a brush stroke enzo, I shaped it half round and made a groove in the middle.



Adding texture to the foreground and carving little grass tufts.




The blueish colour here is a trick of the light. The next stage is to colour the steel black. This is done by heating the steel and quenching in oil. This should make the silver stand out more

All in all, not a bad attempt. Once the heat colouring is done I'll be able to reassess. The steel is soft, being annealed mild steel but it still takes more of a toll on my chisels than the non-ferrous metals.

Lessons learnt from Art Deco Haircomb

At the start of this project I was pretty confidant, I knew the theory behind inlay and I had a great design to try it out on. What I learnt very quickly is knowing the theory and having ok hand skills id not enough to make something spectacular on your first go.

Here are some of the specific issues I encountered

Burrs go blunt really quickly when they're used on titanium and they cannot be resharpened. Burrs are a fixed size and make a fixed size groove. You cannot carve a tapering groove of uniform depth with a ball burr.

Carving using rotary tools is fairly quick but has limitations. As you use a rubber wheel, the diameter changes. As the diameter of the wheel becomes smaller, you have to compensate by moving it from side to side in the concave, resulting in an uneven finish. Rotary tools have a specific contact area and it's easy to grind somewhere you did not mean to while trying to get into the space you are concentrating on.

You have to cut the inlay pieces quite precisely and then file them to match exactly. If it doesn't fit properly then when you hammer the piece down, the top folds over and it can indent the surface of the base material. If the top folds over too much, it has no base to squish into the undercut. Just using a hammer to smack the pieces in is inaccurate so you have to use a punch.

The solution to a lot of these problems is to carve the grooves and undercuts with chisels instead of using burrs. So this becomes my next mission, to make the correct chisels needed for such work. Using a hammer and chisels requires two hands, therefore I will need to prepare a pitch bowl to hold the work for me as well.

Art Deco Haircomb Process

Faced with an Art Deco themed exhibition, I decided to do something which would allow me to try inlay. I thought of a hat pin at first but then found a picture of a hair comb which looked beautiful and which would translate well into the more modern medium of titanium.

I chose to use titanium as it is light which is ideal for something which must stay in the hair. Titanium can also be coloured using heat which would provide the type of contrast to the fine silver inlay I was looking for.

Here is a step by step explanation



design layout and drilled

Most of the piercing done

Piercing complete

Start of the carving, using a carborundum disk

Pattern grooved out and undercut with ball burrs and setters HD burrs

Using masking tape and pencil to transfer the shapes of the voids

One lot in, the next lot cut out and ready inlay

The fine silver piece I cut the small inlays out of

One half done

Completed piece, titanium heat coloured with fine silver inlays