Ford Hallam 2

One of the things I admire most about Ford is his absolute commitment to the traditions taught to him by his sensei. There is a great integrity about not just his techniques but his approach to the way of learning and teaching the subject. All aspects of Japanese thought processes, aesthetic considerations and spiritual ethos are brought to bear on any subject he chooses to portray.

"The classical tradition which I'm presenting is a coherent system that has evolved over more than 1000 years and has given birth to some of the worlds most remarkable metal art. The methods and approach of these artists were not at all simple, nor easy, and any attempt to learn from the past it is sometimes going to entail doing things the hard way to ensure we don't miss something of value. The fact is we can only begin to asses the value of each aspect at the end of the learning process, not at the start."
Ford Hallam

It is not to just be able to replicate some skill level or make objects similar in look that I wish to attain, but to walk this particular path engenders a spirit of mindful approach which I am looking to grow within myself. This approach is exemplified in both Ford and many of his students.

The making of your own tagane, punches and hammers is the start of the skills required. Knowing good heat treating, how to grind, file and sharpen chisels is essential. These skills support good carving as there is often a place in a new piece which needs a different shape or size tool.

During the period swords were banned in Japan, makers of sword fittings turned their skills towards all metal work including jewellery, box inserts, netsuke and pots. This gives a precedent to be able to work on all forms of metal, the approach and techniques used are as important as the final piece.

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.

Test plates etc

I was chiseling away at a test plate yesterday but I've realised something about my mental process, test plates/pages don't work for me. To put care and hours into something I have to believe it is the final piece. Testing a carving technique by carving a flower pendant works, if I just carve a plate with no purpose I peter out about a quarter of the way in. If I screw up royally then it becomes a test piece but mentally I must be making the real thing or my brain shifts to neutral.

A bit of a revelation

I had a bit of a revelation yesterday when I was making splash pages and sorting through my powerpoint definitions. I've been looking ford some unifying factor in my body if work, a theme which binds them while I actually had one. The Japanese skills and aesthetics is the unifying factor. The narrative can change from one piece to another.

Blanks ready for shaping and a new project

I've made 15 blanks for tagane and 2 for scrapers.



Also this weekend I swapped a new old stock razor for two straight razors. I've liberated them from their old celluloid handles, will clean up the blades and make new handles. Probably from titanium with carving and possibly inlay.

Normalising

Normalising is a tedious business, so I roped my son into helping. You have to heat the steel slowly to critical temperature, then allow it to air cool, then repeat. On the last cycle I put them into vermiculite to cool over a long period of time. This makes the steel soft enough to file.

New blanks, new blisters

I bought some Saben silver steel from Bohler steels. 8mm round bar, 2m long to forge into small tapered tagane blanks. After a chat with Tiaan Burger, and a chance to handle his tagane, I realised mine are way too big and need refinement.

My knife maker friend has a forge and anvil and a whole workshop setup so I went there to do the forging.














After forging and cutting off the blanks, the steel needs to be normalised, which means heating to critical temperature and allowing it to air cool. This settles any internal stress the steel may have from the forging. On the last normalising cycle, the tool get put into vermiculite to cool over a much longer period of time. This is annealing, it softens the steel so I can shape it with a file.

Next step is shaping by grinding and filling, then hardening and tempering, then sharpening. By the end of the week I should have a batch of new tagane and punches.

The reason brushwork was so influential on metal work

The reason the tagane (chisels) are called the "iron brush" is carvings were closely related to ink paintings. This is not just some beautiful metaphor but as they were working in pre-photography times, ink paintings were the only common visual reference. Patrons would come in with a painting and want some part of that carved into a tzuba.

Thoughts and feelings around the art deco haircomb

While I was happy that I was able to inlay the silver, I had mixed feeling about the final look. The piece looked fine but the inlay was rough and unrefined. I felt like an amateur which is unusual for me in the metalwork arena.

I have been attracted to the Japanese way of working metal for a long time now but have not dared dive into it yet. The best way I can describe it is 'cold feet' I know that once involved it will consume much of my time and energy. For the practitioners who's work is worth looking at, it has become central to their lives.

So in order to get stuck in I have replaced the word nervous with excited and now I am very excited to give it a go. Fortunately, there is a master in this field who is free with his hard won information and very encouraging to all who contact him with a genuine interest. His name is Ford Hallam and he runs the forum Following the Iron Brush. This is a small example of his work:

The tools are the first step and so I have contacted a bladesmith who lives near me and he will help me with steel selection, heat treatment and grinding the profiles of the chisels.

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