A more detailed look at projects.
February 6, 2012
The single rose I made on Saturday looked a little sad all by itself so I cut up the rest of my roll of copper and made five more on Sunday. Six copper roses looks much better than one. Paired with the red glass vase I picked up today, these should look good.
February 4, 2012
A few months back I started reading at www.shopfloortalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9451 about making roses out of steel. Someone mentioned making one out of copper. Recently I decided I needed a copper rose so I stopped by Lowes to pick up the parts. The parts are made out of solid copper flashing. Turns out Lowes doesn’t carry copper flashing so off I went to Menards. Menards not only had copper flashing, they had two sizes of it. The 24″ by 10ft roll was around $90 and the 6″ by 10ft roll was around $35. Not sure how much I would be using and being cheap, I got the 6″ roll. Turns out I can probably get 6 roses out of the 10ft roll. I also picked up a roll of lead-free plumbing solder containing silver and a tub of flux.
I somewhat copied the parts from SFT and drew them up in AutoCAD to make templates. Download my templates here. The only change I made was to round off the corners more after I cut the ‘petals’ out. Also missing from the templates is the hole in the center to attach the petals to the stem. I free handed the leaves to a shape that looked rose-like. A final note on my templates, there are quantities listed on each part but as printed will result in the correct number of each part. It is as simple as printing the PDF, cutting out all the pieces, and tracing them onto the metal.
Cutting out the parts was fairly simple; I used aviation snips but heavy scissors would probably work as well.
This was the first time I’ve soldered using silver-bearing solder and flux but it wasn’t too difficult. The key is to use just the right amount of heat to keep from burning the flux away before the copper is hot enough to melt the solder. The next one I may try TIG welding just to see if I can do it.
The petals were bent using a combination of hands and pliers – the copper is very easy to bend. Once all of the petals are soldered on and bent up, the very edge is bent back to give it the effect of blooming. The bending back needs to be done slowly and carefully to avoid tearing the edge.
It is pretty heavy for being made of sheet – I would guess it is a few pounds. The edges are also pretty sharp.
It turned out very well for the first attempt. The next one I will try varying the leaf structure and maybe try using fewer petals. I’ve seen some designs that use three sets of petals; this one uses five. Also, I may try doing the edge bending before adding the next layer of petals. Bending the center ones was a bit tricky with all of the outer ones in place.
