Rivet Rings

So the plain copper rings were pretty fun to make. I’d always wanted to try forming rivets by hand from solid metal wire, so I tried riveting some brass plate to copper.

My first try is not so pretty. You can see from the classic “half moons” in the metal that I wasn’t doing the hammering right. They’re also pounded down a little too flush. Even though the metals were annealed they buckled a little while forming them into a ring.

The second attempt is better. I didn’t mark the ring surface at all while hammering the rivets. I had much tighter fits between the copper wire and the holes I drilled. This kept the rivets from leaning over or bending before the heads formed.

Copper Rings

These are my first shots at simple base metal rings. I used metal snips to cut some strips of copper, aluminum. and brass. These simple projects went pretty quick. I gained some excellent practice time with my filing, metal sawing, and hard silver soldering skills.

I used this instructable entry. The instructable is very good but omits some information. It looks like they initially cut strips with a metal cutting band saw. They leave out entirely how they polished the inner ring surface. I’d guess it was hand polished or they used a rotary tool with a cloth bobbin. Finally some of the example images have recessed black designs. You can create these by engraving or using a rotary tool with a small grinding burr. Use liver of sulfur to treat the surface and achieve the blackened effect.

To hide the silver solder seam on copper and brass materials I left the ring in a saturated solution of used pickle to copper plate the ring. Pickle solution is used to remove oxides after annealing and soldering. I use sodium bisulfate (swimming pool chemical) in a crock pot set to medium-high. As far as I can tell Sparex from jewelry supply stores is the same thing but with a different name and a premium price. You can also use a solution of 20% sulfuric acid and ~8% hydrochloric acid. It should work better for copper, steel, and brass but it’s a little nastier.

After you’ve used the pickle a while it becomes saturated with copper, turning it blue. At this point you can plate pretty much any metal by throwing it in the pot with a bit of iron and leaving it for a couple hours. If you put anything besides copper into your pickle solution though it will contaminate it. At that point if you tried to solder something that you had in the contaminated solution you would probably have a very hard time getting a good solder joint. This includes tongs you use to pull pieces out of the solution; so build yourself a set of copper tongs with some scrap copper strips and rivets.

The plating process will plate everything. It’s fine for a copper ring but for a mixed-metal ring there is some extra sanding to be done. After plating and polishing (and sanding) I applied a clear lacquer to protect the finish and keep the copper from reacting with skin.

First Post

Hi, welcome to my WordPress.com blog covering coppersmithing and metalworking projects.