Sterling Bend

Steaming the Wood

Steam bending wood is not as complicated as you might imagine, especially for jewelry where your pieces of wood are relatively small.

Steaming

I steamed wood for this design in a pressure cooker, with a 1/4" of water in the bottom, for 5 minutes. A regular vegetable steamer basket in a covered pot works just as well, taking about 12 minutes instead.  The most important part of steaming is having a good stable form(jig) that allows you to quickly apply a lot of consistent pressure. The photo below doesn't show it, but it is usually best to add some sort of support to the outside of the wood between the pegs and the wood. I often use an old plastic ruler, which really helps prevent cracking of the outer surface during bending. 

Once you pull the wood from the steam, you have about 20 seconds to get it in the shape you want. The faster, the better, preventing rebound and cracking.

Drying

If you have the time, wood should be left in the form over night. However, this prevents using the form for that whole time, so I usually dry the wood in the form with a hair drier for about 15 minutes and then add a rubber band to prevent rebound while it dries completely overnight

Metal to Wood Riveting

After cutting out my design in sterling I needed to attach it to the wood using a reliable cold connection. I soldered 20 gauge sterling wire to the ends of the sterling sheet to be used to rivet the metal to the wood. The hole drilled in the wood needs to be reinforced with brass tubing to allow the riveting to work at all, otherwise it will sink into the wood like a miss hit nail.

Miniature Yo

Two tiny little copper Yo-yos took a bit more effort than you might think to make, so I thought I'd give a summary of how it was done.

Shaping The Hemispheres

I started by annealing 24g copper sheet and cutting 4 discs. Annealed 24g doesn't take much to punch out, so you don't need the fanciest disc cutter(yes, I am making excuses for that cutter. My nice one is in the shop.).

Next, I shaped the discs into domes, not quite full hemispheres, in my dapping block. 

Soldering the Spheres

The soldering was pretty simple, using hard solder chips on the inside of the domes and doing all 4 at the same time. Each piece was then cut out with a jewelry saw, filed, and finished.

Finishing the Yo

I used a tube cutter and a miter to square the tiny tube ends. To keep the spheres aligned during soldering, I used pins and small amounts of easy solder chips. This part was the only real challenge, flowing the easy solder to join the tube ends, while not unsoldering the spheres themselves. 

One downside to the final soldering step is that the whole piece becomes annealed again just before final finishing. For this design it's not a big deal, just requiring a bit more care when finishing to avoid denting or bending the center tube. A tumbler could be used to harden the spheres, but the center tube would remain a bit soft.

Making Surfboards

I made some surfboard earrings and thought I'd walk through some of what i did.

Joining the Wood

As with most wood working there were a lot of clamps, even for a tiny piece of wood. I cut a small block of teak in half and then a thin sliver of walnut on my table saw. It took an hour or two before I unclamped and started working with the wood.

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Making Clean Cuts

As much as it seems inefficient to use a table saw to cut tiny pieces of wood for jewelry, it's been the only way I've found to make clean and uniform cuts of wood. To keep my fingers, I temporarily glue the small piece of wood to a larger one before running it through the saw. Once I had my surfboard board, I just cut out the shape i wanted with a jewelry saw and rounded the bottom with a file and some sandpaper.

not cutting my fingers off

Making Fins

I cut the fins from 18 gauge sterling silver and modified an existing sterling french hook for the "leash". To get the correct amount of solder in the correct place I fluxed and quickly melted a chip of solder(easy) on top of the end of the hook wire, which I unbent. I used easy solder to melt at a lower temp and avoid melting the wire itself. Then I fluxed the fin and soldered the wire to it(without melting everything into a puddle).

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FInishing

After pickling the silver, I hit it with some 1000 grit paper. The boards got natural wood stain and a very thin coat of wax the following morning.

That's it. Feel free to ask any questions.

(And yes, some of you might have noticed a flaw in the surfboard design.)