Saturday, 14 August 2010

New rings


This is the second peice i made is this range. its made from one of the first good polycrystals. The frame is a perfect (almost...) cube. I used a cube as silver, along with most metals, has a cubic stucture.

silver crystal jewellery


This is the first peices of silver crystal jewellery I have made. as you can see (if you've seen my website or work) I have used the same protective frame as my 'Lattice' work. As well as its protective qualitys, the frame askes you to look inside the peice.

Saturday, 7 August 2010

Large copper cystal



This is the first copper crystal I have produced. it's really hard to photograph and get across its complexity. Its about 60mm wide. There are larger crystals near the core, I would like to grow larger crystals in the future. I think the process is very temperature dependent. I started growing these in May when (in England) we had a few weeks of hot days and warm nights. This is when the best of the crystals started to grow. I would need to have a system of very good temp control to grow consistently large crystals but i don't have that at this time.

My copper set up


I have been growing copper crystals in these contaners now for a few months and some are getting fairly large. Although i would like the process to run faster. The power supply is an old, homemade affair which i got from ebay for 99p(!).
The power supply has no current limiter so I have to run it at its lowest voltage. It is currntly running at 50 mA and is powering 5 tanks. I use stainless steel anode baskets as they are very convenient and you can instantly reuse any unwanted crystals. Interestingly enough, there are 3 different crystal formations (different habbits) in the tankes and I can't work out why. I dont really want to as I like the idea that copper is doing it's own thing.
The copper is these tank is destined to be used in a range of scuptures is am woking on.

My setup


This is my set up for making silver crystals. this is

running at about 0.01 amps. The electrolyte is silver nitrate. you can see me very crude, polypropylene anode basket. this has a gold wire to attached to it to connect the silver to the power supply. The cathode is fine silver wire. The solution is brown due to iron impurities from my attempt to use a stainless steel anode basket. at the moment the electrolyte is only producing small crystals (i think the solution is to week as the crytals are geting bigger as some of the water is evaporating)