A lot has happened since the last post on the fabulous Year of the Fire Horse parade saddle breastcollar. Two technological advances, that of i-pinning (pinning with i-kandis) and the setting of the gemstones, have been invented and/or refreshed. With these new techniques secured and practiced, the last major questions about making this saddle are answered. Research and development is over, now comes the work. There might be design questions in other parts of the set later, but for the breastcollar it's now just a race against time.
Below is a shot that shows a great deal. The gray lumps are the Thermo-Loc with the next three flame pieces to be engraved, moving from right to left (or near shoulder to the center of the chest) of the breastcollar. The pocket or seat of the third and largest piece (light color) has had its grain cut, but hasn't been Leather Glow'd yet. I prefer this coating to give the glue something to grab onto; Ambroid is not a porous-surface glue.
We also can see the next three pieces after them, destined for the chest shield. The top two are filed smooth while the lowest, a 2-headed shape, is still 'rough cut' (has raw edges).
Something that's happened during the halfway stage is that I made all the drops. Not gonna lie, I was influenced by the fringe on the shoulder epaulets of Mira, the character from Kpop Demon Hunters! Again, these drops remind me this is a parade saddle, echoing the border strips with their little gold spots.
Below we can see some of the chest flames more closely. This is the sequence of their making: To the right is the raw silver sheet and the paper pattern. The chisel, hammered into the woodfibre surface, plus wire cutters, does the cutting out. (It is a single thonging chisel from Tandy's.) The result is the rough cut piece, in the middle here. The flame piece to its left has been filed much smoother. You can see it fits in the top center of the chest. Leftmost is a piece set in Thermo-Loc, before engraving; it fits in the puzzle pattern between the chest and near shoulder.
I said my challenge would be how to hold these flame pieces in place. I didn't want to use pins. Nearly all pins contain brass and that corrodes green against leather. Silver pins were much too expensive and I hadn't found Aluminum pins (okay I haven't looked hard). One might suspect I'd use Argentium itself, but again the cost would be too high (and the labor prohibitive). Instead, I'd spent months turning over in my mind using the i-kandis metal. It was very soft, easily cut and molded, and I had lots of it.
Before I got there, I needed to drill holes for my homemade pins. This is where I went down a rabbithole I eventually had to back out of. Oh those rabbits! They are so tempting! Below is my trustworthy pin vise (top) and its blue plastic case of teeny drill bits. I'd already found out the smallest bits would not stay in the vise under the pressure of drilling metal. (More accurately, they wouldn't cut.) I needed, or thought I needed, something smaller. Imagine my delight when I unearthed a half-size pin vise. It had been buried with my spare tools and unused for more than 2 decades. This cutie was inherited from Ross Young, my father-in-law, who loved odd little tools and collected eye-glass-repair kits compulsively.
Here's what it looked like after some polishing: The smallest pin vise I'd ever seen.
You would think this would do perfectly! But that copper barrel was hollow. There was nothing to stop the drill bit from backing into space under pressure; and that's just what they did. I tried blocking them with some wire, but once again, they wouldn't cut. My hand pressure was not enough to effect a real drilling cut -- not into metal. I risked breaking them, as too much pressure breaks all such eensy-weensy drill bits. When they start bending you gotta quit!
Back to a more primitive, blunt-force approach for my pin holes.
This shot shows both how I made my i-pins (for lack of a better name) and the tools I used to make holes. The X-Acto easily cut little slivers from the 7mm gloss silver square i-kandis (iron ons)(left). The lower two-inch needle had had its eye broken off long ago and I'd used it for years to hammer starting holes. The upper two-inch was a slightly smaller gauge and neatly pierced and opened my holes, again by hammering (gently of course!). The dental pick was the final arbiter and pierced leather beautifully.
Yes, I'm hammering holes in my lovely engraved pieces,...! No, I didn't take photos of the insertion stage. But this is what the back side looks like. The finished saddle parts will be lined with very thin leather so nothing gets snagged.
The trick worked. The i-kandi metal was amazingly soft and could be mashed around with pliers. It was so shiny it blended perfectly with the engraving: No one could find it. I had to keep notes on where I'd put the i-pins before I put in the jewels! Even more amazing, I didn't have to heat up the i-kandi iron and melt the tiny pins,... a huge labor saving, I must confess.
So we come to the jewels.
My next task was to devise a system to keep track of the gems themselves and where they were to go. Fortunately, the TSII had already figured this one out: Tape down a piece of packing tape sticky side up. This trick was first evolved during the 2013 Goehring saddle. Goehring Breastcollar Rough Cut
It was not easy drilling pits into my precious flames. But the cheekpiece test and the first garnet on the near shoulder showed it could be done. Eventually a sequence of 4 tools would be used. Here they are from bottom to top: The broken-eyed needle, my pin vise with its largest mini-bit, a 1/16" bit with the regular drill, and a homemade tool I call the 'starter.' This cone-shaped-tip starter was made from hardened iron bar by William D. Bensema, my dad, long before I was born.
Here's the result. Some jewels were re-assigned when their holes got either too big or too small; one hole came close to breaking its piece, so I picked a smaller gem for it.
And here's the real result, after all the stones were set. I used Triple Thick Glaze as an adhesive. (I know, I know! But this stuff was used for the Fountain Art Deco and seems to work.) Remarkably, all the holes were made and all the stones set in a single day, April 22. One of the gold i-kandi spots popped off under all the handling and pounding. That told me it'd been poorly set, so such a test was just as well! I'll replace it later,...
Can't resist holding it against Spiro!
I am at the halfway point. But there's still so far to go. I don't know if I'll make the 30th, but I'm glad to have gotten to this stage and conquered all these challenges.
Cheers for all the entrants of IMTM! You can do it!
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