R&D Day

Well, all the recent usual suspects are trundling along as before like a Jooky little production line, and so, again, I'm thinking of where I go next - and the future is enamel. Or maybe copper. I don't know.

Today I thought I'd have a bit of an R&D moment, and see whether my ideas for a copper-topped-tele are actually achievable, or more to the point,  whether they are achievable with me as a big part of the fabrication equation.

What the plan is then, is to top the pine-bodied Tele I was talking about with a sheet of copper. I even bought some copper (though I think the bit I've got to practice on is maybe a bit thick to be cut-up-able, but we'll  see.

As for what I do with the copper, assuming I actually manage to cut it into something that looks like the shapes I want when you squint a bit in the dark, well, that is where the R&D comes in, as basically I have a couple of things I want to try.

First up - I quite fancy trying to 'weather' it. I don't mean stick it in the garden for six months; I mean use some sort of chemical bobbins to force the issue.

Roofers do this, apparently, when they put copper roofs on stone cottages so that they look old and green - a patina, I've discovered this is called - and also gardeners do it to copper pots for the same reason.

Anyway, I read somewhere that copper sulphate might work, and somewhere else that vinegar, or lemon juice, or urine or, well, shed loads of ideas to try.

And so that is the plan.

How you 'fix' it so that the guitar's player doesn't get covered in green manginess, I don't know, but I guess I’ll have to find out.

The second idea I want to explore, is enameling. You know like you see in hippy shops and on the jewelry teachers wear.

Enamel is apparently not something Airfix came up with, and instead is powdered glass that you put onto copper (in this case) and heat up in a kiln so it melts.

I haven't got a kiln, but I know a chap with a blowtorch, so I figured that might be fun, so I'm going to try using one of those instead. I also read that simply heating copper with a blowtorch can induce a patina of sorts, but that is option three and I'm not sure that it is worth separating out as that will happen anyway as I'm not exactly likely to be competent with a blowtorch, lets face it. Dangerous probably.

So there we are, an R&D day, and if I don't breath in the powdered glass, catch something off the cat-piss drenched copper or set fire to myself, I'll tell you how I get on.