Salvaged metal - beauty and challenges

©2019 Barry Smith - Large handmade rusty washers for the book wall

Creativity can of course take many forms. Mine over the last few days has included finishing upgrading the book wall, covering up some gaps in the woodwork on the tank steps and cutting silver-plated trays to make a stash of product.

I needed some seriously big rusty washers  (15cmX15cm) for the book wall and some different sized rusted plate for the sides of the tank steps. The result of that work is above and below.

©2019 Barry Smith - Rusty plate steel cut for washers and cover plates

©2019 Barry Smith - Drilling 12mm holes to make the oversized washers

©2019 Barry Smith - A stack of oversized washers and other rusty bits drilled on the bench drill press

I need quite a bit of silver-plate for leaf spoons and leaf pate knives for Maleny additions. I have had a number of large trays in my stash so I decided to cut off the rims to make flat plate for the product. My bench guillotine is handy for this work; but as it turnout one of the trays was thick (1.5mm) and hard - nickel silver - even a challenge for the guillotine. The other two trays were .7mm thick and were silver-plate over brass - nice!!

©2019 Barry Smith - The largest tray (on the bottom)  was about 60cm long and 40cm wide

©2019 Barry Smith - Large silver-plated nickel silver tray cut into 16 blanks for pate knives 

©2019 Barry Smith - Blanks for leafpate knives and leaf spoons marked up for cutting. The leaf spoons are being made from the second tray - silver-plate over brass

I tested the silver-plated nickel silver metal cut for the past knives - I wasn't convinced I could cut the shapes out with hand shears and that the metal would not fracture with the hammering and twisting. SoI made up one pate knife before progressing with the rest.

©2019 Barry Smith - I was right about not being able to cut the pate knife metal with my hand shears - I had to cut the metal with my guillotine and a mini disc grinder-cutter. Even bending the metal after annealing was a bit of a challenge - but no fractures.

That is as far as I got today