Making a vase from a piece of copper tubing      Home . Gallery . Studio . Vitae	Page 1
	A friend on the Metalmeet site asked me to show him how to form a copper vase out of a piece of copper tube. Here is one way to do it. Tutorial index, go to page:   1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 Here you see the starting point and the vase after two hours of work. The small vase at the right was the one that sparked the request for help. The tube is a piece of 2" type M copper 6" long. The first thing to be done was to anneal the copper tube so it would be soft enough to work. Here it is heated red hot with a propane weed burner and then water quenched. This is the annealed tubing blank next to the stake I used to start the process, showing how much of the piece was sticking out over the end of the stake. This picture shows where I was aiming with my hammer as I shrank (raised) the neck. The hammer is a standard Martin auto body working hammer with modifications. I took a door hammer and ground the straight end into a raising face. This shows the very first blows in the process of necking the top down. I worked around it about 4 times in this position to even out the groove I was putting in the copper. Here I am making another pass in the opposite direction to even out the surface where needed. These two shots show how I rotated the piece around and shrank the end of the tube down to match the groove I had beaten into it. Click here to go to page 2.