Making Copper and Steel Coffee Scoops

Christmas and the holiday gift season is right around the corner, and if you're looking to make some unique items to give as gifts or sell at holiday craft fairs, something like that, sometimes the most efficient way to do that is to buy pre-cut blanks or even an actual kit. And I saw an interesting kit for coffee scoops being made by House Made. Now, I'm not being sponsored. He didn't send me this for free. I paid full price for the kit. And the big thing is that it comes with the tooling. It comes with this really nice swedge for making coffee scoops, and it comes with this top ball fuller that can be mounted in a number of different ways. Matter of fact, it's also used as a bottom fuller. We'll get to that as we assemble this project. And the tooling itself is worth the price of the kit. Whether you ever make exactly the same coffee scoop or not, I think just these two tools was well worth what I paid for the kit. In addition to that, however, this came with two coffee scoop blanks. One of them was already pressed. This is heavy. This is 10-gauge material. And then there is a thinner 16-gauge version that has not been pressed. So this will be easier to forge by hand into this swedge. Also comes with the handles, and these are stainless steel. So it's copper and stainless steel is the way he provides the kit. The holes in these are already drilled, so it's going to be a lot easier to get the rivet holes to line up. And it includes copper rivets for assembly. So it's pretty much everything you need to make two coffee scoops. So the first thing I want to do is go ahead and shape the scoop in the swedge. You could do this with ball-peen hammers. You're going to end up with a much more textured surface than if you use something like this. And I think you can just put this on there, and you can use this to hammer. He shows in his video using a hydraulic press. This goes in the hydraulic press and pushes. I welded up a ball bearing with a round shank on it, and this will go in my fly press. And this would be an ideal project to work on under the fly press. And before we get to the end of the video, we'll look at some changes I'm going to make to this, and we'll do one under the fly press at that point. But to start with, I just want to sink this blank down into the swedge, and I'll do that with the tooling provided. This would certainly be easier under the press, I think. But we are getting there. You don't want to leave a bunch of dents in it, though, at least not on the inside. Now, something else you could do is just weld a ball bearing on the end of a shank. I've made this years ago for some other purpose, but it's actually easier. So there we have our disc. It's got some hammer marks on the inside and some real ugly stuff on the outside. That looks terrible. But it fits on this, and that sits nice and solidly on the anvil. So the next thing to do is to planish or clean up the outside surface. Depending on how good you are at planishing, you can make this incredibly smooth. But the big thing is you're going to get a lot of little even facets that reflect light and really give this a refined look. Looks way better planished, and it's well worth taking the time to do this. Now, I'm just going to use the flat side of a small ball peen hammer to do this. There are actual planishing hammers out there, and you can make those. They're small, they're light, they're easy to work with, have little flat surfaces or round surfaces. Just depends on what you need to work with. But it's very much a special purpose tool, and I think we can do a fine job with a little ball peen hammer. Try to be systematic about how you do this. This also helps refine the shape of the bowl if it's got any lumps or bumps in it. Now, in an ideal world, if you're doing a lot of these, I would mount this to a block, a stump, bolt it down to your welding table or whatever so this doesn't move around. I think he also sells a hardy shank or adapter or something like that that can go with this so you can put it in your hardy hole. That would be a better idea, and if I'm sure I'm never going to use this in this configuration for pressing the thing, I probably will put a hardy shank on this. It would be a lot better, and maybe even an elevated shank so I can bring it up and I don't have to bend over to work on this. I'm not bent over terribly far, but I do have to bend a bit for the small stuff. That's much better. Plus, this is a more comfortable working height. Maybe this vice isn't too tall after all. Now, in total, I probably spent 15 minutes doing the planishing on this. That's time well spent. That's the difference between this having some real style to it and really looking like something special and just being a stamped out piece of copper. This is where you put the effort into the kit, and it isn't just something somebody else cut out and all you had to do is squish it to shape and call it good. But anyways, that does leave the edge a little irregular, and it's a little bit sharp, so this is a good time to do just a little bit of sanding on this. Now, you can certainly do this on a belt grinder, turn the speed way down so you've got good control over it, and maybe be able to get in and get this inner lip. You want to make sure it's not sharp enough to cut anybody, but you don't really want it to feel sharp. People are going to pick this up. They're going to handle it, and they don't want anything that feels uncomfortable. So, this is another thing that's well worth taking the time to deal with. You may also need to sand the inside. Make sure there's no scratches down on the inside of this. Now, I'm using 120. This is just an old sanding belt that broke that couldn't be used on the grinder anymore, but you may want to go to 220, 340, something like that, and I probably will, but I'm not going to make you watch that. I'm just going to finish this up with some Scotch Brite, and that should leave a nice kind of matte finish on the inside of that. I made the mistake of trying to use a similar product that's a kind of Scotch Brite-like wheel on a grinder that generally leaves a very smooth finish, helps get rid of scratches, leaves something very even without belt marks that you sometimes get when you're sanding with a belt sander or something, and I thought that might be a good way to clean up the outside, but like I say, that was a mistake. All I ended up doing was washing out all of the ridges or the texture from the planishing. It was still there, but it was really washed out, muddy looking, so I went back and I replanished it. If you need to clean up the outside, get rid of some scratches, do that before you planish it and make planishing the last thing you do on that outside surface. That brings us to the handles. Again, I'm just going to do a simple hammer texture on this, something I don't really do a lot, but this is the way that he shows it on the house-made site, so I'm assembling the kit the way he intends for it to be done, the way he shows it being done. Then I'm going to talk about why maybe that's not the way I would normally do it, and then I can show you what I have in mind in the long run and what my approach to using these tools is going to be, even though I may not actually use the original kit components. I do think this is going to be better hot, since stainless is going to be a lot harder to work than the copper was, and I'll just use the induction forge to heat this up, but you could just as easily do this with a coal forge, gas forge, or even with a torch. Good place to mention that because stainless isn't magnetic, it takes a lot longer to heat the induction forge, but it can be done. Now, this doesn't have to be at some super high heat to just do this little bit of light texturing. It's just easier if it's in a dull red, but again, you want to make sure that there's no sharp edges. I'm going to let this cool, check it for sharp edges, do any filing, grinding I might want to do, then I'll bring it back up to heat and clean it up just a little bit with a hammer to make sure it doesn't have some polished edge off a grinder, unless that's the look you're going for. While the induction forge works, it is a little bit slow to heat. I think the gas forge may be a better option in the long run. A little single burner gas forge would be perfect for this kind of thing. Now it's time to go ahead and assemble this. The holes are all pre-drilled. They may have been deformed a little bit. You may need to clean them up. Be careful you don't skitter a drill bit around your coffee scoop and gouge it all up. It might be better to get in there with a needle file if the rivets don't fit. It's also a good time to work down this point if it's sticking up. Now, this does kind of swirl around on the top of that ball, and I initially thought using a rivet set on the inside would be the ideal way to do that. It really holds that well. The problem is you have a concave surface, and then you've got a relatively flat surface and an edge all the way around the rivet set. So that means it is hitting inside the bowl of a coffee scoop around the rivet, and it's leaving a track mark in there. Looks kind of ugly. So the first of the coffee scoops I assembled, I got to drill the rivets out, hand sand that back down, put new rivets in using this method. It works much better. Now, I would like to do something with this handle. I don't really like this straight handle. The angle we forged in here earlier isn't too bad, but I think the shape of the handle could be better. That's pretty simply done just with bending forks. I'm just going to clean up the handle and get the kind of scale appearance from the forge off of here. Because it's stainless, it shouldn't need any kind of a finish on it. So whether you put some wax finish or oil on the handle is just kind of up to you. I think I'm going to leave it like this for now and see how they do. Now, personally, I like the lighter bowl on the 16-gauge scoop better than the heavier bowl from the 10-gauge. This just seems like it's disproportionate with the handle. It's impressive. It's got a nice heft to it. A lot of people are really going to like that. But this seems to be a little bit better balance and a little bit more of a refined piece. I think this is my preferred, although this may be a little bit thin. So instead of buying more of his pieces, now I appreciate that Brian has made all these available over at Housemade, and it's a great way to start. And the tooling is wonderful. But since I think I would like a slightly heavier disc, I ordered some 2.5-inch copper discs in 14-gauge. So that's just a hair thicker than this. And I'm going to go into the fly press. I'm going to sink one of those into that swedge. And we're going to see how that works. And then I've got another idea for the handle. So we're going to do the whole project all over again. I'm going to go ahead and pre-drill the hole before I do this just because it should make it easier. But I also then have to make sure my handle fits the hole pattern. If you want a little bit more freedom and creativity doing the handle, you might want to forge it first and then figure out what the spacing is. Now the rivets I have are a little smaller than what were provided with the kit scoops. I've got eighth-inch rivets, and I think those will be okay. These would be really hard to secure into the drill press without scratching up the copper. So I'm going to do with a handheld drill and hold these in the vice. Another way to do that would be with a hand punch. The hand punch is actually much cleaner. There's no burr on the back side that you have to deal with. Let's see how easy this is. Pretty much done. It's definitely the way to go if you're doing a bunch of these in a batch. Fly press is really useful. Now the holes are very deformed now, but I've got the location and I'll clean those up, run a file through them, or take my chance with a drill bit. But we can fix that. Now I went back and watched the instructional video on the house made site, and they had another alternative for doing this that was way better than hammering, not quite as nice as the fly press, but something you probably have available in your shop. And it uses the original tooling that came with the kit. That's to use your bench vice as a press. While it's slower than a fly press, pretty much the same idea. I'm going to put the disc in here, put a little bit of tape over it just to hold it in place while we get this all lined up. And to make life easier, I think I'll use a magnet to help line all this up. That way I don't have to hold on to that. The tape just pulls right off, so that didn't hurt anything. This might be hard if you're using that 10 gauge disc, but with the 14 gauge ones that I bought separately, it seems to be working pretty well. That's not bad. It's a little wonky, but we can fix a lot of that when we do the planishing on it. So this may take a little fiddling doing it this way, but it does work. And it's probably less fiddling than the hammering on the back of this thing was. And of course, with practice, you'll get better at it. This is the same as what we did on the previous scoop, so I don't think we need to go back and do all the planishing and hand sanding and all that just for the sake of the video. It's all the same process. These are just different ways of creating the bowl, either with a fly press or using your bench vise. So I'm going to make a couple of handles, just try out a couple of ideas here. I've got a piece of half inch square bar, so it's about 13 millimeter square bar, and a piece of quarter by three quarter, about six by 20 millimeter. Not sure what the lengths are. I'll probably end up cutting these off as I work with them. It's just to try out some ideas, some things I see in my head. And if I see something I like, then I'll start worrying about exact sizes. Let's start with the square one. I'm going for a tapered octagon for this handle, very similar to the shoe horn we made quite a while back. The first thing I want to do is isolate where that taper will start from the part that will mount to the scoop itself. Now it's up to you what you want to use for a food safe finish. This forged finish from ZH Fabrication is supposed to be made of all food safe components, even though the composite wax has not been tested and certified as being food safe. But for coffee scoop, I feel pretty good. It's not going to wear off wax and contaminate the coffee. But it's really up to you what you want to put on there. Well, I was planning to make a fourth one of these, but it's getting a little late today. And with the time change, that means it's going to get dark here pretty soon. And it's supposed to start snowing any minute now. If it snows a lot, I probably won't get up here tomorrow. So I think that's where I'm going to call this video good. I really like this style of a handle. It's not something you see a lot in ironwork. It's just a little bit different. And it just makes the whole coffee scoop more unique. Now it took quite a while to do this, but I think if I were to do this as a batch run, I could streamline it quite a bit. But I really do like this coffee scoop. It looks good with the copper. Because I heated this up, it actually darkened the copper on the outside of the bowl. And I really like that look. I did go back and polish up the inside a little bit. And that gets rid of any of the excess wax that was in there. Now one like this is considerably more work than just using the kit components. Everything but cutting the disc that I started with all has to be done. And it takes a little bit more time. The handle took a lot more time to do. But I think it's worth it. I really like this. And this is unique now. These are quite nice. They're kind of a popular design. You see these in kitchen stores. And a lot of people on Etsy have similar things. And the more people that buy this kit from Housemade, the more you're going to see that look very similar to this. Everybody's going to have their little bit different touch. And you can do other things with his components other than what I did. You can do some chisel work. Maybe split the end and put some scroll on there. Who knows what you might do with it. But they're all going to be starting with the same components. All going to have a certain similar look to them. But I always like to be a little bit different than the masses. So I don't think I'm going to be buying any more of the components. They are way faster to do. The components cost you more money. So there's more upfront cost to make a scoop like this. But they can be made much faster. So in the long run, you probably could sell these for less than what I would have to sell this one for. I'd probably sell these for $50, $60, something like this. This one, probably try to sell it for $75 or $95. But the reality is, I probably have more like $200 worth of time in it. And I don't know that I would ever sell that for $200. Who knows, maybe I'll try $100 a quarter or something like that. We'll just see. Now from these two, I like the thinner scoop better. The heavier scoop is just a little bit too massive. That's just an aesthetic thing for me. But the 16 gauge scoop is maybe a little thin. I do like the 14 gauge I used on this other one. But these are all good coffee scoops. This is a fun project. If you just bought the kit and made the two, you could give them away as Christmas gifts, take them to your next craft show, something like that. And it would be a fun thing to do. But in the long run, just this swedge, this bottom swedge that they sell that is nicely pressed, has a little lip on it that holds the disc in it just where you need to start pressing so everything starts off centered, which is really a nice feature. That one tool is worth the price for the entire kit. And you get two scoops worth of material. Sounds like a raisin brand commercial. And you get the bulb fuller so that you can use that in the vise or under your hydraulic press. Work with this the way I did in the vise or your anvil if you put a hardy shank on it. Lots of things you can do with this depending on where you want to mount it in your shop. So I think it's a good value. Again, I'm not being sponsored by them. I'm not really trying to convince you to go out and buy them. Just something I was curious about when I saw it and I'm glad to have the tooling. Anyways, I think I've talked long enough. Time to get the shop all buttoned up before it snows. I would like to take a moment and thank each and every one of you for stopping by and watching the videos. That's what makes Black Bear Forge successful. With special thanks to my channel members and my Patreon members, who actually provide some of the funding that is necessary for producing these videos. Channel members receive early access to most of the videos and Patreon patrons not only receive early access, but they also receive the videos ad-free. So I don't run any ads over on Patreon and in most cases any sponsorships are also added out of those videos. But again, thank you everybody that stops by to watch the videos. In the meantime, I hope you have time in your day to get out to your shop, make something, stay safe, wear your safety glasses. We'll see you for the next video.