[Jewelry making - Article 00666] - Re: [Orchid] Hammer Textured Rolling Mill?

[Dar Shelton]

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    The idea of hammering (ball pein) a piece of tool steel (0-1 flat
    stock, 1/8" thick by about 1.5" ) is what I am going to do to create
    a master plate. I made a small test plate and heat treated it after
    peining and flattening it. Being hardened, it's permanent and can be
    used to roll production plates that will have bumps and deliver
    depressions into the end-use material, duplicating the original
    peining as faitfully as is necessary. The great advantage of hardened
    steel is that it won't curl, because the raw tool steel will curl in
    the mill. It's soft enough to hammer cold, and soft enough to curl,
    and would wear out immediately if you were to roll another piece of
    raw tool steel against it. 

    So, the master plate can be used to roll production plates also in
    tool steel, and I did this with the test plate and a piece of 1/32"
    flat stock. Some issues arose around how thick to make the production
    plate, because it will curl and warp less, the thicker it is, but I
    think 1/16" combined with a 1/8" master is all my particular mill
    will handle, thickness-wise. Or perhaps 3/32" for both plates.
    Regardless, the production plate will also be flattened and hardened
    (quenched in oil and tempered to about 450-500 deg.F.( hard but not
    too brittle, a smidge harder than a hammer )). It will not curl when
    running silver strips in the mill with it. I had done a very similar
    process a couple years ago, only with textured brass sheets as the
    production(and sometimes master) plates, and these had short (but
    moderately useful) lifetimes because of the curling. This process
    took multiple runs through to get decent coverage, but with my test
    plates, once through was perfect, because the pattern was not worn
    (nor will it be ) and the plate is perfectly uniform in thickness. 

    One tricky part of rolling the production plate off of the master
    plate is that the mill has to be set just right to give a deep
    forming, but not so tight that the mill bogs down. I have a Pepe
    188.00 (4" by 2" rollers) that I took the handle off of and put a 1/4
    hp gearmotor onto, driven by motorcycle chain and sprockets. It's
    gotten stuck a couple times... not a good thing for equipment or
    user... not particularly dangerous, I don't think, but it gets the
    adrenaline going!!. If it's set too loose, the forming isn't deep
    enough and unless you can realign the plates perfectly (I can't) for
    another run, you have to start over with another plate. 

    Also out of all this came an idea when I was replying to a reply from
    Durston Rolling Mills. I was inquiring about a custom made roller for
    this job, but although they can do it, it's cost-prohibitive for the
    customer I'm doing this for. But that made me think of taking a raw,
    unhardened roller from a mill company, or having a duplicate
    fabricated, and hammering it. I don't know how practical or costly
    that would be, since I don't know if there are gears machined onto
    the rolers or not. If not, it's probably a cost-effective idea for
    some folks. Anyway, you'd pein and harden the roller and then running
    production plates off of it would be simple. Or, because the bumpy
    texture on metal rolled with a first generation peined plate also
    looks very nice, one could simply use the peined roller to ...um, 
roll
    very nice looking bumpy metal in a one generation process. Smiles. 

    I am planning on taking some pictures and making them available
    online after I get this job going. Oh, the job itself is to make bead
    halves in hammer-textured silver, which the client will make into
    full beads. I have to make some one-step, no-tab RT/Pancake dies for
    the bead halves, so the whole project together will be fairly
    interesting. 

Dar Shelton
SHELTECH
http://www.sheltech.net
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