- Joined
- Dec 27, 2013
- Messages
- 10,102
There's not much I can do with the thin skin remnants of a crashed SR71 Blackbird. Can't make a knife out of it. Gotta do something with it.
What to do? Make guitar picks!
We start with a crumpled piece of titanium aircraft skin, shown here next to a twisted piece of fuselage:
The skin piece is tediously pulled open with pliers and a blowtorch:
Guitar pick shapes are traced:
Rough cuts:
Profiles are ground to shape:
The picks are hammered nearly flat:
Ground even flatter:
Edges are rounded and polished, and the surface is reasonably smoothed:
The picks are ready to rock! They're very thin yet quite stiff.
These were a bit of a pain to make, shaped totally by hand. It would have been much easier if I had a hydraulic forging press, and then also a maker's mark could have been added. In the future, once I get get ahold of a press some day, I'd like to make a few more. These examples are irregularly-shaped, not perfectly flat, and of uneven thickness due to hammering. Each one is different.
What to do? Make guitar picks!
We start with a crumpled piece of titanium aircraft skin, shown here next to a twisted piece of fuselage:
The skin piece is tediously pulled open with pliers and a blowtorch:
Guitar pick shapes are traced:
Rough cuts:
Profiles are ground to shape:
The picks are hammered nearly flat:
Ground even flatter:
Edges are rounded and polished, and the surface is reasonably smoothed:
The picks are ready to rock! They're very thin yet quite stiff.
These were a bit of a pain to make, shaped totally by hand. It would have been much easier if I had a hydraulic forging press, and then also a maker's mark could have been added. In the future, once I get get ahold of a press some day, I'd like to make a few more. These examples are irregularly-shaped, not perfectly flat, and of uneven thickness due to hammering. Each one is different.
