![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/0621121051301.jpg\" "\\"062112105130(1)\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nIt was comprised of nine ellipses. They were slices of a metal cane I made, applying a glass-making technique to silver and copper wire. I wanted the final product to resemble millefiore, little copper blossoms in a sea of silver.<\/p>\n
To make the cane, I bundled copper wire together in groups of five and six. Then I hard soldered them together. This created silver spaces in between them, but my copper-bearing start melts too low to be used at the start of a multi-stage, complex operation.<\/p>\n
Once soldered and cleaned, I wrapped the bundles in silver wire and filled in the gaps with more silver wire too. Coated with flux, I medium soldered them together, until I had a solid cane.<\/p>\n
Here’s what the canes look like when I’m done. I slice off little coins with my jewelers saw.<\/p>\n
I’m not a big fan of the third hand, and this confirmed it for me. I was one join away from finishing my ring. I needed to put a little tension on the joint, since solder won’t flow across a gap. S I hate putting my tweezers directly in front of the torch since it wrecks their temper. I also avoid binding wire, since I have accidentally soldered the thin iron wire to my work more than once.<\/p>\n I didn’t stop to think about critical failure of the other joins when I was trying to reach that magical 1325\u00b0F that easy solder flows at. What I didn’t think about was that all of the other joins were also reaching that point. Two of them did and the third, the one I was trying to solder was so very, very close. I wasn’t fast enough to overcome my own stupidity and very quickly was ducking hot metal flying through the air.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Honestly, I was lucky not to have gotten burned. This if what remains of a very cool ring I was making. It was comprised of nine ellipses. They were slices of a metal cane I made, applying a glass-making technique to silver and copper wire. I wanted the final product to resemble millefiore, little copper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":480,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>o, I decided to brace my work with the locking tweezers that are mounted on an adjustable stand, a.k.a the third hand.<\/p>\n<\/a>