CuForming

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Making a Balled up Ring it's Easy

To make this ring with Lapis Lazuli a little bit special, I round up the ends of the loop with a torch. The flame and gravity take part in this easy project that every beginner can do.

I'm also gonna show a few more advises about stone preservation and power supply settings.

Tools and material for this project:

Starting by cutting a piece of copper wire a little longer than the length I need. Then I bent it to a horse shoes shape and set it on a copper pipe with the ends pointing downward.

With my torch, I heat the ends to melt them until two drops of liquid copper can be seeing.

Then I quench the piece in water and put it in pickling solution to clean fire scales.

With a steel mandrel and a rubber hammer, I harden the ring a little to let it keep the final shape.

Using my DIY water dropper and the rotary tool with a diamond cutting wheel, I cut a piece of lapis lazuli slab that was too long for a ring.

To join the stone and the loop, I used CA glue. The loop was hard enough and precise to stand on the stone by itself.

I apply conductive paint to cover the stone. I'm not doing the usual stoke, I'm applying it coarsely to bring out texture. Conductive paint needs to dry for at least one hour.

With a wooden stick, I apply liquid latex on the top of the exposed stone to protect it. Lapis lazuli can be dissolved in the electroforming solution and being ruined. The Solution itself, reacting with the stone, can be also get ruined.

After the latex dries, I dip my piece in the electroforming tank. Right after the piece got submerge in the blue liquid, bubbles can form on top of the graphite paint because of surface tension. I give it a few strokes with a brush to break the tension and prevent more bubbles to form again.

When everything is secured with cloth pins, I start my power supply and set it to the low amperes range.

The range must be between 0.01A and 0.1A.

To set the right current, we need to multiply the surface of our pieces in inches square by this range.

I made a few more pieces and all the surface measured approximately 4 inches square.

I decide to proceed in 3 stages. Low stage for 2 hours at 0.04A, Medium stage for 8 hours at 0.20A and Hi stage for 14 hours at 0.40A.

When, after 24 hours, everything was finally ready, I removed all the pieces from the bath and wash them in distilled water.

I prepared a container with distilled water and a bit of liver of sulfur and dip all the pieces together for 10 minutes to get a brown patina.

Always remember to neutralize liver of sulfur before flush it in the drain. In this case I did it with bleach, but backing soda can be used too. Also, you can leave it evaporate on its own in a ventilated area. Liver of sulfur has an intense smell produced by the evaporation of the sulfides, just like rotten eggs. Don't breathe it.

After that, I wash all pieces back in water and finally remove the latex coat to reveal the stone under it.

With a polishing pad for metals, I tried to clean some of the black patina by hands. It was a very tedious job, so I mount a split mandrel on my rotary tool and insert a piece of polishing pad. In less time, I was being able to reach all the gaps and crevices of the ring and bring back the shine.

To protect it from further oxidation, I dipped it in Zapon lack. It's a varnish specific for metal jewelry. Few seconds in it and then a little centrifugal motion to remove the excess.

Zapon needs at least 2 days to dry completely.

Here is the final result.

Please check the video on YouTube.

Thank you all. CuForming.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

How to make DIY Copper Electroforming Solution

Here we are finally with the recipe for the electroforming solution.

Few simple ingredients that can be easily found at your local stores or on the internet and few simple steps to prepare the most important component of electroforming.

Inside this liquid happen all the chemical and electrical reactions that lead us to our amazing objects.

Please be careful of how you handle these ingredients, some of them can be dangerous.

We need 4 ingredients:

4 liters of Distilled water (1 gallon)
907gr of Copper Sulfate (32 ounces)
32 ml of Sulfuric Acid at 37% concentration
10 ml of Midas Brightener

and some tool:

Plastic cup or any other plastic or glass container
Funnel
a Graduated plastic or glass container
a steel pot or a 5 liters glass beaker
coffee filters or professional lab filters paper

The first thing I'm gonna do is to dissolve the Copper Sulfate in the Distilled Water. To accelerate the process, I warm the water up a little. Then I pour the two ingredients in to a bigger container and mix them up once in a while until it is completely dissolved.

Once there are no more copper sulfate crystals on the bottle's bottom, I filter the liquid through a pile of four coffee filters with a funnel.
Copper sulfate can contain impurities that need to be removed. The liquid must be clear to have a good result.
This part is really slow, so take your time.

After that, I add 32 ml of Sulfuric Acid. Be careful with this ingredient because it's dangerous. Try not to spill it on your skin. If you do, wash the part immediately. Use gloves and eye protection.

Here we have a ready electroforming basic solution. With this mixture, we can start electroform our objects. But the copper coat is gonna be rough and opaque.

To solve this problem, we can polish them mechanically with rotary tools or tumblers.

In this case, I used Brightener. I added 10 ml of Midas Brightener.

With this substance, our electroformed objects will come out of the tank all shiny.
There are lots of brands and kinds of substances that can be used to make our pieces shiny but I'm gonna talk about this topic another time.

The Solution is ready to be use so let's see how thing come out of the tank.

Don't forget to check the video on YouTube.

Thank you all! CuForming.

Monday, February 14, 2022

Valentine's Electroformed Heart Leaf

For Valentine's Day, there wasn't a better plant to use for a project than Smilax Aspera.
It's a perennial, evergreen climber with thorns, and it's also a poisonous plant.
It can be easily recognized by its heart shaped leaves.

Smilax was a nymph from Greek mythology.
She was in love with the young Croco, but the gods opposed their love.
Croco committed suicide and Smilax was transformed into a creeper.
She still shows her love with these beautiful heart shaped leaves.

All the material and tools I've used for this project are:

With a super fine sharpie I marked the outline for the gemstones and I made the holes with a precision cutter.

Then I glued the hang ring and the stones around the holes with UV Resin.

I covered it entirely with conductive paint and hang it for at least an hour to let the paint activate.

When I dipped it in the electroforming bath, I noticed lots of little bubbles on top of the leaf.
With a brush, I broke the surface tension to avoid bubble to form again.

After 20 hours… maybe more, our leaf is finally ready. I removed it from the tank and washed it with distilled water to clean all the electroforming solution residue.

I then prepared a low concentrated solution of liver of sulfur and dip the leaf in to it. To accelerate the process and to make a more attractive patina, I added a pinch of copper sulfate crystals.