Hello Everyone,
We've got gray skies here today, and it's rather chilly. But at least I can report that over the drizzly weekend the tiny patch of snow in the backyard has finally succumbed. We have daffodils just about ready to break into bloom and I'm sure there are some hungry little juvenile newts roaming the woods looking for springtails.
Today I thought I would post something a little different. I have worked with these materials for so many years that I sometimes forget that there are other directions that I could go in. Titanium is roughly half the weight and twice as strong as steel for prying, but much softer, so that means it deforms and scratches more easily. For years I have played around with electrical anodizing and developed many different types of finishes, but I generally ignore heat treating because the resulting colors are not as vivid and they are much more difficult to control. Heating also alters the surface of the metal by laying down a very tough layer of oxides. So if you do want to make a change in coloring or finish, then it makes for a ton of extra work. The heat treat process hardens the surface of the metal, and that can be used for an advantage in that it increases the scratch resistance and improves the material's tendency for deformation. You can never achieve the hardness and toughness of steel, but it definitely does have a noticeable effect on wear and tear.
So today I have a batch of Titanium Pryon Tools for you. This is the trial run featuring my new Heat Wave finish. For now I am just doing a military-like grayish bronze color, but I will play around and see what else I can come up with down the road. Today's Pryons feature my usual array of crazy stamps, but I do have a few without if anyone wishes to request them. And I do have a couple of lefties as well.
Pryons with Heat Wave Finish will run $70 plus shipping and the link is below. Thanks for coming by, and I hope your week is a lovely one despite the worrisome world.
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