[Jewelry making - Article 01034] - [Orchid] Pancake Dies: My Further Adventures

[Dar Shelton]

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    You might think that with some spare time over Christmas I'd have
    taken it easy and worked on music or laid around and eaten candy all
    day (ok I did a fair amount of all that) but it seemed like a good
    time to get around to some important documentation of my
    experimental exploits. Also, since the 1/2 HP gearmotor I found
    wasn't here yet, more attempts at pushing the little Pepe rolling
    mill to the brink of it's doom would have to wait. 

    So much earlier this year I had gotten the (maybe not so ) bright
    idea to make an elaborate, 2 part, cut and form, pancake die set,
    just for the purpose of show & tell about how to do it. I had cut
    the pancake die, a funky flaming- sun shape 4.75" in diameter, with
    the expectation of making it into a 3-D ornamental sun-face project.
    It was a busy year, so it waited until now to go any further, and I
    made a sculpey clay sun and used it as the model for an aluminum
    sand-cast punch component that would attach to the pancake die. The
    other part of the die set is a female mold, cast in plastic steel,
    using a sheet metal shell (that's made by getting formed around the
    sand cast punch) as the model. 

    I wanted to make the sun with a face on it, but found the level of
    my small-scale artistic sculpting abilities to be sadly lacking, so a
    plain, faceless sun it would have to be. Unless... 

    It kept bugging me, because for one, a plain sun probably wouldn't
    even require a female mold to form ; it would probably work as a
    one-piece die, with the cast punch attached to the die, but simply
    pressed into a thick urethane pad for forming and cutting. It was
    bugging me, so on the night of the 23rd I looked around online and
    found some flexible molds for clay that looked like they had some
    potentially usable faces, and ordered a couple. Then came Christmas
    Eve morning, and being obsessed as I obviously was at that point, I
    just couldn't wait, and went to a crafts supply store and found a
    similar mold and took it home to proceed. 

    Obsessed, impatient, but with a plan, I quickly made a little clay
    face and cooked it. Then I simply made a little mound of sifted
    casting sand and pushed the face into it to make a cavity to cast
    into. I used silver, and then ground the back down so that it would
    fit onto the flat spot I had sanded on my plain sun. Not a perfect
    joint, and being the 25th at about 3 am by then, I wasn't going to
    be able to go get any plastic steel, and I was obsessed. So I did
    what any normal, calm, rational, obsessed person would do in this
    situation : I swept up some metal dust from around the sanders,
    mixed it with some epoxy, and patched together the sun and sun face.
    Now it was a SUN FACE !!! YIPEE !!!. 

    Now, a few days later, the project is nearing completion, and I took
    detailed notes -for of course there were new twists and turns that
    previous similar projects didn't take -- and lots and lots of
    pictures. None of the pix are developed yet, and it may be some time
    before I post the step-by-step and pix in a formal way, but it feels
    good to have started working towards documenting my infamous
    escapades. Chipping away at it like this, there's a good chance that
    I will leave behind a decipherable record of my practical/functional
    obsessions. Oh, and the gearmotor came today. Pepe, my friend... say
    your prayers !. (No, I will not destroy my rolling mill. I will not
    destroy my rolling mill. I will not....) 

    I did scan the shell made by pressing the cast punch into rubber,
    urethane, and plastic. 

Stay tuned,
Dar
sheltech.net
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