A Bramblebush Workroom Project

Repousse` On Mild Steel

A brief demonstration by Chris Ray

Page 02

Now the work is flipped over and the bulging areas are better defined with tracer like tools. These are sort of chisel edge shapes, but they are all rounded rather than sharpened. Now, a variety of curves are ground into  these tools to conform with the different radii they are meant to define.  

It could be a maddening thing but you will eventually realize that you never seem to have the right curvature and are constanly making up new tools.  Well, if you have a basic stock of tool steel then it doesn't take very long to shape a tool on a grinder and eventually you'll acquire a usable range of shapes which are useful.  The down side to this is that over time you may end up with scores of tools and keeping them organized into sets then becomes a nuisance. Well it does if you simply like to pickup what you need immediately and keep the rhythm of your work going at a certain tempo.

I simply store generic families of tools in tin cans (I tend to eat more Dinty Moore's Stew than is good for me just to have those tin cans) and then just dump them on the bench to find what I'm looking for. It works well enough for me until I dump two families of tools on the bench. Bad day at the OK Corral when this is done and you have to resort to a hunt and peck method to store the tools later.  

Oh well, some folks have a better handle on organizing this stuff than I do so it may not be a problem for some. Ideally you should make a rack made of wood or other material with holes drilled. Stand each tool upright so you can spot the right tool of choice by its end shape and you'll do just fine with this.  My tools are made of anything I find handy so there is no standard size which makes it impossible to decide what size hole to drill into a storage block to fit them all into.  Hey, that's my problem so don't pay any attention to this.

Okay enough of this. Let's move on.  At this point the rubber mat is removed and the work is hammered directly on the heavy iron plate underneath. When tracing the edge, you also move the metal out away from the protruding form.  In other words you are not just hammering straight down but sliding the tool outward as well. This way you are spreading out the thickness of the metal rather than cutting right through which is what may happen if you're too vigorous with your hammer work. Don't try to take the edge definition to completion just yet but allow enough metal remaining around the edges for continued work later.  Understand that the work is being done on the flat bottom portion of the piece, not on the sculpted forms yet.

So far the convex surfaces haven't been worked on yet to eliminate the dimples produced by tooling from behind.  this will be done after the pitch is applied.

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