Santa Clara

[armando_m]

"Santa Clara del cobre" - a small town specialized in copper crafts
I visited over the weekend with my family, the town is in the mountains of the state of Michoacan Mexico, the town was founded by the original inhabitants of this region, it used to have a copper mine, when Spaniards conquered the practices to process the copper were modernized, the craftmanship improved and it has remained since, today the copper is sourced from recycling materials.
When you come as a visitor you are first presented with the stores of the finished products, asking around we found a store that had a workshop with a person showing the basic process on a Sunday.
Here are some images from the workshop, the forging, polishing and finalized products

Here is a piece being heated, it starts as a block of copper which that gets hammered into a sheet before starting to shape it, so this piece is halfway, for the forging the piece needs to be hot otherwise the copper becomes fragile and breaks

[armando_m]

The copper pieces are hammered against iron molds, the heating has to be done every 1 1/2 minutes

[armando_m]

To clean the black finish the pieces are heated and cooled, this removes much of the black and leaves a somewhat copper color, it is followed by a bath of dilute sulfuric acid, and rinse with more water, leaving an even opaque copper color.
To polish the pieces are hammered some more, the hammerhead is polished, each hit leaves a bright spot.

[armando_m]

Finished products

At night I realized the camera was shooting JPG only, I was a bit anxious the images would be useful, but other than resizing I'm quite happy with them.

[golunvolo]

That´s a beautiful workmanship and design. As images, I relish the ones showing the man working. Photojournalist style.
We also have a strong heritage of copper work for the kitchen, nowadays mostly used as decorations.

[Akira]

Thank you for sharing this well documented copper craft, Armando!

Apparently, the basic method for forged metal ware is universal.  There is also a tradition of forging copper-, silver- and tin-ware here in Japan, but the design aesthetic is different from area to area, which makes it interesting and precious.

[Hugh_3170]

Great sequence  Armando.  I also appreciate your commentary & explanations of the various processes involved and shown in these images.

Finished products

At night I realized the camera was shooting JPG only, I was a bit anxious the images would be useful, but other than resizing I'm quite happy with them.