Copper Brand Set

Its the most wonderful time of the year! A joyous time of inside jokes, snarky gifts, relentless mocking, and degenerate revelry. That's right, it's sekkrit satan time again. An annual tradition in my hall, this all-important holiday is an opportunity to give our victims hallmates the gift of spite and hate. It's the time to get to know a person, their hobbies, their interests, their passions, and their values so that you can make them something that contradicts all of it. In case I didn't make it clear, this is really fun for me. If you missed it, check out this page to see what I made last time I participated.

In all seriousness, I honestly think sekkrit satan is a better variation of secret santa than the original, because it really necessitates that the gifts be personal and heartfelt. While regular secret santa is flexible enough to allow shallow, last-minute gifts, the rule of sekkrit satan forces the gift giver to actually put thought and personal connection into their contribution. That being said, this year I kinda ran out of time, so this is neither heartfelt nor personal. But it is pretty cool, and that's all that matters.

My recipient this year was a guy named Brandon and there's a lot about him I could have used for making this gift, but since I was doing this the night before, I went with something a little more...direct.

I made a set of brands.

This is clearly very nuanced, high-IQ wordplay so I don't blame you if you don't get it right away.

Anyway, I had a couple of 3/4" thick copper sections that I had found in the recycling a long time ago and I figured this was as good of a time as any to make use of some of them. 

First things first, I jumped onto Illustrator and played around with a couple of designs I thought would look good when permanently seared into a subject (the subject being tables, walls, and other inanimate objects, not people...unless it's consensual I guess). I came up the following phrases that I felt would allow Brandon to spread plenty destructive negativity this holiday season while still being general enough to be used on a variety of surfaces.

As you can see, the vector design above is a little more complicated than just text boxes (Arial Rounded MT Bold Font if you were curious). This is for a couple of reasons:

1. If we just cut letters out of the copper, we're obviously just gonna get a handful of loose characters that won't be much good to anyone. We need some way to hold all the letters together to form the words and phrases above. Hence the bar underneath the letters, which not only gives the letters a thicc backbone for support but also serves as a nice, hefty underline to really get the point across.
2. By nature, branding irons get hot. As cool as it would be, I can't really expect Brandon to wield these as brass (or rather copper) knuckles. So I needed some way to attach a nice long handle that'll keep the heat away from the user's hands. I played with a lot of ways to incorporate this into the design, but eventually I settled on the simple solution of adding a little circle thingy to the middle of the spine/underline that could be tapped to accept a 1/2"-20 threaded rod I had lying around. This would let me extend the handle out and make it easy to swap from one branding implement to another using the same handle. Modularity!

I contemplated this design a lot before finalizing it because I intially wanted the brand to just be the letters, without any extra bits like the bar or the threaded fixture. I looked into using the waterjet to etch, as opposed to cut, away copper where the bar would be, thus lowering it below the surface of the letters so that it wouldn't show up when the brand is applied. Sadly this was much easier said than done with the Omax waterjet software, which expected vector lines wherever I wanted the etching passes to cover. Since I couldn't find a good way to make this happen in Illustrator (and because it was already like 4 am at this point) I settled on leaving the bar, but using a file after the fact to take away material where the ring was. If everything weren't right, the resulting brand would just be the words and the underline minus the extra circular mount.

With the design finalized, I exported the DXF and brought it into Omax Layout to generate the toolpaths. FInally it's over to Omax Make... where we find out the cut is gonna take like 3 hours. And that's even after deciding not to cut the GARBAGE tool. Well, I already got this far, guess I'm pulling an all-nighter for this.

I loaded up the copper, and three hours later we are left with this. I forgot to put tabs and the pieces fell into the waterjet abyss never to be seen again.

Just kidding. The surface finish on the raw copper wasn't really presnetable as it still had the saw marks from being cut off. I grabbed a couple sheets of sandpaper and worked my way up to 400grit on both pieces, eventually wet sanding to even out the surface a bit and remove any directional scratches. This left them smooth and defect free while still not uncharacteristically shiny.

Tapping the hole was way harder than expected. I guess I should have seen this coming—copper is already notoriously hard to machine, so running a 1/2" tap through 3/4" of copper was not gonna be an easy task. Anyway, I forgot to take pictures while I sweated and struggled my way through these holes a quarter turn at a time so behold the result after my hard work.

I gotta say I really love that sparkly-matte finish that the waterjet gives on the sides of the pieces.

The handle was pretty straightforward, I didn't really have the energy at this point to cut and shape a nice one. I found a section of 1" round dowel, cut it to an appropriate length, squared up (more like burned) the sides on a worn out belt sander, and precariously drilled a 1/2" hole down the center using a drill press.

After a little coat of boiled linseed oil, I mixed up some 5 minute epoxy and used it to glue the 1/2"-20 threaded rod into the aformentioned hole.

Finally, I threaded one of the copper tools onto the handle, lowered a brass nut until it was snug against the tool on the top side, and soldered the nut in place with a little torch.

The purpose of the nut was to ensure that the tooling can consistently get threaded to the right depth. Accidentally threading too far can mean the threaded rod would stick out beyond the surface of the brand, preventing good contact with the surface, so the nut, which is fixed to the threaded rod, acts as a stopper at the correct length for more consistent results.

Also, its a little easier to see in this picture, but I used a file to take away about 1/16" of copper on the ring section to bring its surface below that of the letters and the spine/underline.

There's the finished set. Wish I had gotten to spend a little more time on the handle because it looks a little crummy next to the the nice copper tools, but I'm pretty happy with the way the colors of the gold brass threaded rod, orange copper, and yellow wood sort of work together.

Wrapped up, with a little copper tape for cheeky accent.

24 hours later it looks like he's already making good use of it. I'm proud.

Happy holidays!