Tour De France Metal Work - Jewellery Workshop

Jewellery Workshop - 

To create this small curved square we used the fly press, which to do so we used a wooden mould already created and selected a few pieces of rubber of a very similar shape to the mould, (The sizes of the rubber should be 1. which is the same size as the mould  2. one slightly smaller 3. another one a little smaller than the second) This was to make sure the shape curved whilst each time you placed the mould and piece of rubber beneath the fly press. 

To use the fly press it was like a huge handle to swing from near one side then swing heavily to the next, whilst the press put a great deal of pressure onto the metal and mould/rubber. Once you forced the bar as far as it would go you gave it a few hard tugs to make sure it worked and the so do the same with the next sizes of rubber, until your finished, This was my end result as a small tester piece. 

This was the start of my main piece towards the Tour De France project, I used my first mood board with the cogs for my inspiration towards this, This was the largest cog to go onto my Card block background, For this I first planned out the cog on paper, i then cut it out and spray mounted it on my metal, as this seemed like an easier way to cut out the shape easier and neater. To cut out the pieces inside, i first used the center punch to mark where i needed to drill on the pillar drill. Once i drilled the holes i a marked i then used a small saw to pierce out the inner pieces. I continued to do this for each part. 

            

 This was the finished product after I finished cutting the outer edges of the cog, I also tried to neaten the inside and outside parts the best i could with a rounded file and a quiet miniature file. 

This was the second cog i created, which was a size smaller than the first, This one was different too, as my aim was to make them all individual, This one is different as i used the circle cutter to make a brass circle, then a dice shaped metal block with different sizes curved circles in, To get the curved shape like i did i used some circle stamp objects which i would chose a size slightly smaller than the hole but just enough to fit in it, then hammered a few times, I did this until i was happy with the shape, and more or less used all the holes within the dice shaped block. I wanted this one to stand out with the two different colours as i wanted them to look different rather than standard copper cogs or brass all the way through my design.

                                                     

                                                 
This was the third Cog I started to create on a piece of copper also rather than brass, This one was a bit smaller than the second one as i want them to go down in size as i mount them up and overlap them. I used a different style for this one also. This one was a little more awkward to pierce out as the inner parts were a lot more closer than the others and i was afraid i was going to cut too far out from the lines. 

 This was all three of my current cogs lined up with one another to show the size comparison so far. The other cogs will hopefully have some space to do an outer edge like the first cog, as i wanted them to look as though they could fit into one another.