New Website

With a great deal of effort, I have finally gotten my project website off the ground.  You should be able to find it at enamelminiatures.com.  If not, I'm going to be sort of pissed off, so please let me know if something goes wrong.

Here's a gif.  I'm going to bed.

(I didn't figure out how to crop gifs until I had done a couple of them, so just pretend it is dancing in celebration of my finishing the site.)

Dies and Interchangeable Parts

So, I'm looking to make some jewelry pieces which use individually painted enamels in mass-produced settings.  For that to work, the enamels need to be uniformly shaped (I'm working with a slightly domed oval). I have been using an acrylic die in a hydraulic press to shape to copper I'm enameling, then cutting and grinding them down.  It has worked, just not amazingly.  My die is a little on the wonky side, resulting in slightly eccentric shapes (exacerbated by the fact the edges aren't crisp enough to follow easily when I take them to the sander).  Here's a (kind of crappy) photo of the finished enamels.

For reference, the graph paper squares are 1 inch by 1 inch.  I'm pretty happy with the painting, but the circumference difference between the smallest and largest pieces is about 5mm.  In terms of jewelry sizing, that is really big, and limits the options for setting types.

So, I'm trying to come up with something better. Jewelry supplier Rio Grande's commercially available oval cutter is a. really expensive and b. too small.  I've just found Potter USA's dies, which are much cheaper but mostly made for circular press setups (which may or may not be an issue).  I'm going to keep searching, but it may be my best bet is to have something custom made, at least for forming.  I'm still not sure about better cutting options for the formed copper, though this looks interesting.

In any case, if I opt to have a simple steel silhouette die made, there are a number of water jet cutting services available, so if need be I'll have a plate cut rather than resulting to an expensive custom die manufacturer for industrial use.

The Old and the New

It has been very interesting to compare the advantages and disadvantages of Rhino and 3D printing with the work I did over the summer: spin cast pewter.  The vulcanized rubber molds and low viscosity of the pewter can make for extremely high-fidelity, high detail castings for a pretty low cost, though they naturally lack the strength of bronze or silver (or even copper).  However, you can actually cast mountings/pinbacks in place, which is neat, though not magnets given their susceptibility to heat.

I worked for Perth Pewter in Chester, NY, which specializes in larger, more complex pieces for the gift market rather than hobby models.  To give you a sense of the attainable detail, here is a piece slightly more than about four inches high. If anything, the image doesn't do it justice.

Buy me!

Though this is not where I worked, and there are some substantial differences in the details of production
(like the molds' levels of complexity and finishing procedures), this video gives you a taste of the process:

I'm particularly interested in using CAD processes to create armatures for physical sculpting and to make uniform, embeddable objects for casting.

Research

So, I've been thinking magnets.  I'm planning on making interchangeable settings with magnetic-backed "jewels."  For a variety of reasons, I need to minimize hand work and processes like soldering, so I'm looking for cold connections and stuff that can be done via outsourcing.  I found a place that sells neodymium magnets, and can even make them to your specs. 

Beyond that, I've been trying to come up with a magnet-compatible material for jewelry.  Magnets are heat-sensitive (particularly anything close to soldering temperatures), so mounting additional magnets onto jewelry becomes a bit of a logistical issue. Steel is quite strongly attracted to magnets but is inclined to rust unless plated or sealed (and that is no guarantee).  Stainless steel? That starts to get interesting.   

If you've ever dealt with a fancy stainless steel fridge, you are probably aware that magnets don't usually stick to stainless.  This does make me a bit sad, as the stainless 3D printing is all currently non-magnetic.  However, there are multiple types of stainless.  We most commonly see austenitic stainless (the 200 and 300 series); due to its atomic structure, magnets won't adhere to it (much).  What I need is ferretic stainless (400 series).  It doesn't hold up as well as austenitic against things like high heat and certain chemicals, but it also doesn't require heat treatment/hardening to set its magnetic properties the way martensitic steel does.  There are other, specialty alloys of stainless; I'm only touching on ones relevant to my concerns.

However, there is another concern: skin/metal contact and the potential for reactions.  Though I know some folks consider the term "stainless steel" to be synonymous with "surgical steel," that is not the case.  Happily, the British Stainless Steel Association has kindly come up with a list of "safe" stainless with sufficiently low nickel for those with sensitivities.  They were even kind enough to denote the type!

So, for a magnet-compatible stainless steel that doesn't require elaborate hardening treatment, has workability, and is safe for the skin,  I need ...drumroll... AISI 430 / 1.4016 ferritic stainless steel!