Heat treating copper

Here's a tip from Robert Dancik, and I thought I would give it a try.  Heat patina on copper.

Heat an oven to 350 degrees, put the copper wire in the oven and heat it for 15 to 20 minutes.  Even though it's hot outside, and the oven does put extra pressure on the air conditioner, I just could resist trying this out.

I coiled the wire, and just for purely experimental purposes. put some of the spacers which I had cut from copper tubing, and some jump rings, in a little metal tray, and put everything in the oven.  Set the time for twenty minutes.  All well and good, except I got caught up in something and didn't here the timer go off.  So, I don't have a clue how long the materials stayed in the oven.  As it turned out, I don't think any harm was done, but the colors!  Wow!  They are hard to describe. There's gold, silver, a purplish silver, two-tones on some, bronze, and bright copper.  Why didn't the pieces come out as one color, and why some with very little change?  Mystery.  I"m going to do some more experiments, but I'll wait for cooler outside temps.

Anyway, thought I would pass this on, maybe others will want to give this method a try.

Changed the bench pin to a larger surface which should help with the preliminary sawing.  I will still need to make some little improvements on the larger pin.  And, I need to reposition the bench pin as it is really too high for my comfort.  Gah! So many things I need to do to make life easier!

Finally broke down and got an inexpensive filing block.   If you ever buy one, better buy a bottle of rubber cement, as the block is not fixed to the base, which makes it useless, at least for my purposes.  But it works fine now that block is cemented to the base.  Very helpful adjunct to the bench.

And now, I have to make more jump rings and tube spacer's.