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Turned Aspis Project in Progress
#26
Quote:My dream is to have two interchangeable bronze sheet facings.

Hah, that's no fun! Definitely make 2 whole shields!

Quote:I have found a metalspinning company that may work with me on spinning a face.

Cool beans! Gonna be a heck of a tooling cost, though...

Quote:Bronze is incredibly expensive right now, so I have to see what I can do.

You won't an actual historical alloy of copper and tin. The closest is phosphor bronze, 95 percent copper and 5 percent tin (plus a dash of phosphorous), but it apparently is not made in pieces more than 12 inches wide. Silicon bronze is easy to get (if not "cheap") but has no tin at all. "Commercial bronze" is really a low-zinc brass, 90 percent copper and 10 percent zinc, but probably looks fine. (The scrap I've been using for all my stuff is likely commercial bronze, but I don't really know! Nice stuff to work with, looks great.)

Quote:If I can't get it spun, I thought about making a form in my backyard, pressing my shield (protected) into wet concrete, and dishing bronze sheet into the depression.

That probably won't work. It'll make a terrible mess of the surface of the metal, in any case. Better just to throw a heavy canvas tarp onto the lawn and dish the metal right into the ground! Basically a variation on the sandbag technique. Shape a rubber mallet to sligtly round the face and remove the edges, and dish with that. Once it gets to a bowl-like shape, check the fit on your wood blank, maybe dusting the wood with chalk to make marks on the spots that need more dishing. I'd probably do the bowl and rim from separate pieces, for the first try. Gonna be a heck of a chore annealing the metal, too, but do it frequently.

You can practice on scrap steel, like old shelves pulled out of trash piles. Learn a lot about techniqe without wasting good bronze!

Khaire,

Matthew
Matthew Amt (Quintus)
Legio XX, USA
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.larp.com/legioxx/">http://www.larp.com/legioxx/
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Messages In This Thread
Re: Turned Aspis Project in Progress - by Chris B - 05-27-2008, 08:45 PM
Re: Turned Aspis Project in Progress - by Matthew Amt - 05-28-2008, 04:46 PM
Re: Turned Aspis Project in Progress - by Kineas - 06-02-2008, 01:41 PM
Re: Turned Aspis Project in Progress - by Kineas - 06-16-2008, 01:40 PM
turned aspis - by The Spinner - 06-17-2008, 12:21 PM
print - by The Spinner - 06-17-2008, 09:27 PM
Turned Aspis project - by Paullus Scipio - 06-18-2008, 01:58 AM
Re: Turned Aspis Project in Progress - by Magnus - 03-12-2009, 02:27 AM
RE: Turned Aspis Project in Progress - by Feinman - 08-14-2017, 11:37 AM

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