In honor of Valentines day, I figured I'd take a shot at making a copper flower. I used 28 gauge copper sheet for the petals and 1/4 inch brass round stock for the stem.
This project is pretty well documented in a number of places online (see link in the process section) and from my experience seems to turn out a nice product even with a fairly large number of small mistakes along the way. If you are looking for a nice evening project, this seems like a great option. I chose to do this build mostly with hand tools (and the lathe) but it'd go a lot quicker if you used a water jet/laser cutter to shape and texture the petals.
Process:
I roughly adhered to the following instructable (click me) with a few notable modifications.
- I cut each set of petals pretty roughly and used a belt sander to get the final shape.
- I found it pretty hard to texture with a crow bar and used a chisel instead.
- While texturing the sepal I introduced a few annealing steps on the stove to prevent the copper from tearing.
- I turned down and threaded the end of my stem and used a nut to hold the petals to the stem. (I also used a file to round the end of the stem.)
- I used a small quantity of super glue to hold each set of petals in place.
Notes:
- Parts could be water jet instead of cut with tin snips for significant time savings.
- The 40 Watt laser is probably capable of etching a lot of the texture lines.
- The super glue worked fine and is a lot easier than welding/soldering.
- Variations in petal size should be avoided where possible since that creates gaps between each layer of petals.
- Cost: 12$ (Unit cost for multiples of 2)
- Time: 7h (4h petal and stem prep, 3h assembly and patterning)