Playing with metal dough

Writing a new tutorial for bronze dangles from homemade bronze clay. First time I'd read about homemade clay at metal clay academy site. The article was written by Del Feast and there he shared his experiments with homemade bronze clay. Then the commercial glass clay appeared and Barry  Kaiser shared his point of view and recipe about glass clay making. I like experiments and possibilities. I merged these two ideas into one and tried my own formula. Then I have found an interesting article or better say patent document "Moldable mixture for use in the manufacturing of precious metal articles" , that was interesting. Couldn't refuse myself more experiments:o) So I decided to play with recipes for clay.  Bought copper, bronze and brass powder and began to "cook". 

 These colorful bronze pieces from another batch and copper just after tumbler nice and shiny

 

The brass was totally failure (didn't liked the color either, colorwise it's almost like copper, so I decided to leave it as a filler for resin), bronze got strange rough texture and a lot of cracking, but sintered well (even thick pieces) under 1550F, copper - was the best, a few cracks, but not really sintered (especially the thick pieces) so I re-fired all pieces at 1700F. So far what I see - Borax takes patina off. In the big pic there are two sets of bronze. All they were fired together and taken of the coal at the same temperature. And you can clearly  see the difference in coloring. In the mix just with CMC (pic 3) there was difference in kiln patina (I think) because one batch was taken off at 450F another at 650F. If my memory serves me right bronze dangles that I made before I took off the coal at 700-800F and the color was darker green. Conclusion for bronze - play with heat (just careful ) to get playful colors:o) 

 

B/W this hand is same colorful piece above just with lacquer. Such a bullsh*t when they say it doesn't change color!!! I'll toss it to kiln and will see what will come back?!