The Bowl Process

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(aka. a battle shield for my dog)

B E F O R E   S T A R T I N G
Somehow, all the circle templates were all over the place, so I heavily considered just getting a new one laser cut. 

P A R T   O N E :  C U T T I N G


Manual Tabletop Shears. Mark it out using the circular patterns which had been laser cut out. Pretty straight forward.


P A R T   T W O :  S H R I N K I N G


Shrinking. It looks like a pie tin because I AM SO WEAK. Had a mate help me get it a little deeper.


20 minutes into shrinking and shaping it. Bit of a gap but that's okay. The English wheel should smooth it out.


P A R T   T H R E E : E N G L I S H   W H E E L



Okay, this is the part which made me stay (probably unnecessarily) in the workshop for the next 3 hours. I put it through the English wheel and the top of the dome was near perfect but somehow the sides had flattened out?????????????

I took the mallet and went back softly on the inner edges to get it curved more in the places where it wasn't the right radius but then the top became the wrong radius again. So I went back into the English wheel but the same situation happened. So I tried putting it on the dolly and using the mallet on it there. 

Somehow I just could not seem to get the centre and the sides of the dome to be the same radius. 

My solution was to do the best I could with the wheel and then head to the COFA campus and borrow a rawhide mallet to hammer in the edges. I think the mallet had a larger surface area and a softer contact surface so the dents wouldn't show up so much on the bowl. 

P A R T   T H R E E : P O L I S H I N G 




If I get the chance, I'd love to smooth out the base of the bowl because it's making the bowl look more elliptical than anything really. I didn't try to do the hammer tone effect on the bowl but that's something I've done before on a smaller scale on a ring- so I'm hoping I can really sand and polishing it down further to a mirror surface finish.

In reflection, this is the first piece of metal shaping I've done on such a large scale. So it was definitely interesting to compare how to deal with the way the metal folds between a piece of jewellery and a large piece of metal. A lot of arm strength is involved and definitely a lot of consistency when going around the bowl in hammering it. 

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