Home / Recent Work / Vine Snake, 2017, Hammer-formed copper and grapevine wood. 20" x 16" x 6" / Vine Snake, how it was made 21
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1. Ready to start the longest piece I've ever made. A one foot by four foot piece of 16 gauge copper, ready to cut out.
2. The piece cut out, ready to start forming after the edges are smoothed out.
3. With a plastic mallet and V-block, the lengthwise curvature is initiated.
4. Now it can be hammered into a cylindrical form (spiculum).
5. forming the head of the snake on a special stake.
06. Forming the underside.
7. The seam for the head has been closed up. I will silver-solder this first, so it won't open up when I close up the rest. 
8. Silver-soldered and pickled. I will clean up the excess silver-solder after the whole thing is done.
9. Using the tool on the left, hammering on the nose to make it more rounded.
10. closing up the rest of the seam.
11. SIlver-soldering the seam. Those cheap Walmart "visegrips" really come in handy for things like this. I have put a U-shaped piece of brass in between each clamp and the snake to protect it.
12. The silver-solder just love to go other places besides the seam, which means a lot of painstaking filing.
13. Then to remove the file marks, I'm going over it with a unitized wheel in the flex-shaft.
14. Now for bending. This was very hard work.I made this special bending tool out of hard maple, which was helpful.