[wc cal]

Hi,

My name is Will.

I discovered metal working when I retired from an IT profession a few years ago. I make a lot of stuff that goes in the junk pile and I have just scratched the surface of metal forming, but I am enjoying the process.

My main interest is lamp making and sculpture at this point. All the failed lamps turn into sculpture. (That's a joke....sort of).

I am also doing electo-etching and vitreous enamel on much of the stuff that I do. I have a semi-large enamel kiln and I am working slowly on a spray booth. Other ways of applying vitreous enamel don't scale very well.

I started with fold forming copper and silver and spent some time learning raising, sinking and forging for small scale objects by hand using sandbag, anvil and stakes.

I joined the San Francisco Metal Arts Guild and met a copper smith who specialized in candle sticks. He introduced me to small power hammers, metal lathes etc. I have not added those to my shop, but I do have access to them. He also showed me that you could work with steel to make your own tools.

Recently I discovered automotive sheet metal work (amazing stuff) and added (I mean jammed in) an eastwood bead roller with motor, a small English Wheel and a stretcher-shrinker to my workshop. A 3 in 1 break, shear, slip roller is on my wish list for next year.

I bought that 5.5 inch top English Wheel that you can get on ebay for $140. You have to shim it in several places to get any alignment and I expect that any pro would laugh at it, but it works pretty well on small copper and aluminum pieces, or maybe I just don't know any better. When smoothing a dome it beats the heck out of bouging and planishing on a mushroom stake. It comes with six bottom wheels and they are pretty good.

I hope to get a better one some day.

I was very happy to find these forums.
I have so much to learn that darn near every post is teaching me something.