Sunday, March 05, 2006


This was a puzzle. Why would The Kalo Shop allow this out of the shop when it is so very crooked?
Must have made it past the keen eyes of the Master Smith.
Then over time someone tried to straighten it by pushing the base and in doing so pushed the center of the bowl up.
As you can see the ring under the engraving. I use a mushroom stake with a thin layer of plastic sheeting to push out by hand the ring. (This is something you never want to hammer out, it only makes the ring line stronger and you will lose the engraving)There is no way of getting the line of the base out when there is engraving. When there is no engraving you are saving and the metal is thick enough you can burnish out the line.
To find the old solder joint, it is easy to take a reducing flame and play it over the base, the line of solder will show itself and you can easily see the joint. Cut along the old joint. Be sure and make matching marks before you cut. Otherwise you will lose the placement of bowl and base.
This is a delicate operation, because if you remove too much metal by your filing you will run past the line of the design. Then the stem will not meet and you will end up thinning the walls to make meet. So go slowly, matching and adjusting very slowly.
The re-soldering is not the hard part. Once soldered you have lost the color at that point, because you will have used an easy silver solder. So the color of the bowl and base are different. This takes much hand finishing to match the colors of the old and newly soldered parts.
I go over the new skin with liver of sulphur and then hand rub with one of the old sunshine clothes until it matches bowl. This can take longer than all above.
There is one huge no no, on all antique silver and that is putting them on a wheel. Why, because the color is very important to the collector. I will go further into this another time.