Forging Santa & an Elf in Copper!

Hello everyone, welcome back to the workshop. So in this video we are going to be taking a look at forging a copper Santa ornament blank and a copper gnome ornament blank in this video. So the very first step in this process is for the Santa we will be defining, you know we define the area or the brim of the hat of the Santa. You can do this in any way shape or form that you choose or that you see fit. We have to define where the hat is going to be. So I define the brim with a simple chisel. This could be a cold chisel or a hot chisel as you're seeing in this video. And then I like to define also where the top little ball is, a little fuzzy ball at the top of the Santa hat is going to be. After that we go to texturing. We're going to texture the Santa beard itself and we're going to do that with a cross peen. Now we need to do the texturing of the Santa beard first before we put the nose and we put the nose and mustache over it. And the reason for that being is we want that to run all the way up underneath there and we don't want any hollow spots underneath or blank spots that we can't get back in with the camera at a later date. We're going to cover it up with a mustache. So after we've done that we're going to go ahead and texture out the mustache as well. And so it's going to be the same process that we've done with the beard just using a cross peen hammer. Now if you'll notice in the video I did use a chisel to kind of make some segmentations of where the beard lines kind of like make some individual areas where the beard's kind of growing to give it that impression that it's growing at different lengths. And I find that that helps sell it just a little bit better in my own opinion. So I will do that also for the mustache as well to kind of give some division or breaking up so it doesn't look like one solid texture. So now we put it on the piece and we lay out where our eyeballs are going to go. Now you want to kind of just line things up and see how far up you want your mustache to be to the left to the right right find center and that that will dictate where you want to put your eyes in. And I just did a simple center punch mark for the eyes so Santa on my end has some beady little eyes. Of course if you have more elaborate tooling you can do an eyeball punch and do some people if you do all sorts of cool stuff you know depending on what you have available to you in your own shop. From there we're going to mark out the whole locations with a center punch mark for the nose. That will be drilled this is a quarter inch rivet by three quarter inch long. The three quarter inch long is just a hair big but what I could get in copper you know to be able to supply so later on in the future I may be able to find them a half inch long which is about the right length that you need for this. So three quarters just a touch long so you may want to file that rivet down a little bit before you actually go and rivet this guy up. But at any rate we will drill the hole for the drill the hole through the Santa drill the hole through the the actual mustache and then we will mount the rivet through and we will upset the back of the Santa. We will put the bolt in for the nose and then for the flat end or the shank of the rivet that's going to go on the back side and be peened down. The way that we support this front rivet is by putting it in a in a swedge tool or basically a rivet bucking tool. We do sell these also at our website they're fairly economical and cheap they're just a quick thing or you can make them yourself with you know if you have a ball peen hammer around and a mallet you could wale that into a flat bit of material and create a depression like that to support your rivet head. I do have full tutorials online how to do those so that supports the nose so the nose doesn't flatten out and it keeps it that nice round button nose on it. So after that obviously there's going to be a hole drilled in it and you're going to do some finish work for these I just lightly sand them I touch them up with some sandpaper to just give it the highs and then I coat it with paint just some clear Rust-Oleum enamel or really any crystal clear enamel finish that gives it a little bit of a gloss gives it that kind of premium feel. So next on we have the gnome the gnome is going to be a lot of the same process in this particular case I outlined where the head was going to be at the rim and the hat was going to be just like before with a chisel and then I use a center punch mark to define the rim of the hat if you will just kind of give it some decoration you know those could be just little studs or who knows what you know little puffy balls on there at the rim of the gnome or the hat and then I actually chiseled in where the feet's going to be. Now you don't have to do this step if the if you're going to keep the beard flat if you're going to dome the beard or give the beard little flicks or curls or movement then it will show underneath and so it's nice to have a little interest so just for the sake of the video I went ahead and chiseled in where it's where the gnome feet would be but after that it's going to be the same process we're going to drill a hole that we're going to run a ribbon lanyard through that it'll hang from our Christmas tree right I texture the hat area up a little bit hit it up with the highs and again we rivet down the nose we rivet the nose you know put it through rivet the nose and the beard on of course the beard is going to be textured with a cross-team hammer. Now some variants and some things that you can do to these you can you could add lips to these you can put little lines or little holes you can make mouths you know forge out ears you can do so much with these it's really one of those projects where you can go as creative and be as wild as you'd like with it or subdued and plain as you'd like it all depends on the time that you have but anyways I think the copper with those subdued colors of just being forged with little highlights on them really give them like a richness and you know a premium feel so we do also offer these in stainless steel and they're copper and mild steel so if you're interested again go check out our website it's over at www.blacksmithingblanks.com and you be sure to find that down in the description down below as well as any additional information around making these or tutorials that'll all be linked up in the description thank you so much for watching thank you to the channel members that make this content possible god bless each and every last one of you and hope you have a merry christmas and happy holidays