Large copper bowl

 

As part of a commission I'm forming a large (about 450-500mm in diameter) copper bowl out of an old clothes boiler that someone had flattened the bottom of and been using it in the garden. The bowl is coming along reasonably well as you can see from the opening photo. I quite like to fire colour in the photo above - it was taken after annealing and quenching.

After cutting the boiler down I started to 'sink' the base to create bowl shape.

A few rounds of annealing and quenching took place.

As you can see from the photo below the bowl needs a few more rounds of annealing and hammering to improve the shape and to get some of the wrinkles out.

I hope to do a bit more work on it tomorrow. I can only do an hour or two at a time as it is quite a noisy process - and there are neighbours close to my workshop. It is a bit of a challenge to handle a bowl of this size when hammering on the anvil or stake. I'm mainly using a largish Japanese wooden hammer for the first stages of the work.