On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:14:40 -0700, in rec.crafts.jewelry "William Black"
wrote:


"Georgia" wrote in message
. ..
I was surprised and disappointed to find, on Googling "sinusoidal stake,"
to
find only a handful of sources--Otto Frei, Walsh (all the way in the UK),
and Allcraft. Am I missing something obvious here?

1. Walsh's sell mainly German stakes.

2. They're a specialist 'detail engineering' supplier as well as a
jewellers supply house.

3. That's a bloody odd piece of kit for a jeweller, I've only ever seen
them in an armourer's workshop where they're used to make couters and
polenys.

What are you planning on making?


Mr. Black's posting, and his being unaware of what the stakes are used for in
the U.S., nicely illustrates just why sinusoidal stakes are still somewhat of a
rarity. Most larger stake manufacturers are traditional european firms, or
patterned after such, and making designs refined over a long tradition of their
use. Anticlastic raising, by contrast, is quite new, and it's teaching has
been, so far, mostly concentrated in the U.S. The word itself only entered the
metals field by means of Heikki Seppa's (spelling? Not gonna look it up. sorry
H.S.) cool little book on shell forming and nomenclature in the 60s, which
introduced as well, some new ways of thinking about metal forming and the shapes
one could get, as well as why work that way. But his work was larger in scale.
Not until Michael Good, for the most part, refined thos methods to work on a
small jewelry scale, were "raising" tools of a size needed to make jewelry,
needed enough for standard designs, like a sinusoidal stake, introduced. That
stake, which is nothing more than a convenient means to have a whole series of
progressively smaller anticlastic curves on which to work on small items, all in
one tool, is quite specifically the result of Michaels innovative work and
methods. European jewelry traditions have not yet really incorporated those
methods, though of course individual artists may well have, just as U.S. artists
learn stuff from their european colleagues. But the tools are still pretty much
limited in availability, since the market for them is still small.

Peter