Spent the last two days making titanium blanks for a pair of earrings and a couple tactical beads.
It’s a lot easier if someone else makes the knife or jewelry blanks, but no joy here…
Starting a new project – a tactical bead in titanium. I blatantly stole the bead shape from sergeknives.com and I’m carving a wraparound centipede with 24 karat gold legs.
After yesterday’s shameless commercial (I offer no apology!)
, we’ll continue with the centipede tactical bead…putting in all the gold inlays (28 of them), and reminding myself why I need to steer clear of this terrible titanium 6Al4V. Remind me next time I get this crazy idea…but, I have ordered some Grade 2 Ti, so not to worry!
I’ve removed all the background – next will be punch sculpting the body, followed by stippling the background, and we’ll be done!
Here’s a short video of the Centipede Bead: Sorry, you’ll have to click the link to make it play…Centipede_Tactical_Lanyard_Bead_2
Finished, except for a little cleanup (tomorrow!). Hand engraved and carved titanium centipede, with 28 pure gold inlays, 7/8 of an inch tall.
OK
, I had a cute idea (even if I do say so myself) to turn a tactical lanyard bead into a pendant…a simple turned hanger (this one is copper) and a couple of jump rings, and voila! It’s nondestructive, so if you want it to be a lanyard bead again, just remove the jump ring and it all comes apart…
Spent the last two days turning six lanyard beads for tactical knives in Grade 2 titanium, copper and bronze. Here you can see the various stages of manufacture, including drilling the titanium. The titanium drilling took longer than the rest of the operations combined! I’ll be engraving these over the next several months.
After engraving the centipede tactical lanyard bead in this $@:*+{: terrible 6Al4V titanium, I wimped out and just “knapped” the second one, did a little minor engraving and stippling between the flutes, and heat treated it to a nice dark gold color.
Making a copper pendant “dangler” at a client’s request for the faceted tactical lanyard bead. This one is designed for a ball chain.
I’ve spent most of the last week working to create enough blank canvases to carry me through the next several months. Not my favorite part of the action, but eventually I run out of them so it’s back to the grind…literally!
Thanks for Looking!
Tom Sterling
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The first few steps to inlay the gold wire in the dragonfly earrings. You can see the first gold wire tacked in place down the length of the dragonfly (lower right image) along with the double ended knife I use to trim the wire.
