Coming Soon – Hadar’s Cold Inlay Powders

3 powders
Although there are many creative possibilities for inlay work in metal clay, inlaying one clay into another prior to firing can be challenging. For example:

  • It is hard to fire clays together which have different firing temperatures, such as steel and White Bronze, or bronze with a large amount of steel.

    • Bird black on gold

    Bird silver on black

  • It is hard to fire clays together which are not compatible with each other, such as silver and bronze, or silver and copper.

    • Gold in silver

    Silver and copper

  • It is hard to fire clays together which have different shrinkage rates, such as silver and steel.

    • Two birds black on silver

  • Inlaying prior to firing does not allow very subtle relief or fine detail.

    • Black on gold

    Earrings silver on black

  • Sometimes it is possible to fire one clay first, then inlay another clay into the fired piece and re-fire. However, since the second clay tends to shrink away from the first one, several re-firings are sometimes required, which is a highly time-consuming process.

  • Repairing cracks and gaps, too, requires re-firing, sometimes more than once.

  • It is impossible to fire to fire metal clay and other materials together , such as wood and polymer clay.

Hadar’s Cold Inlay Powders – soon to be released on our Web store – are designed to address these challenges.

What is Cold Inlay Powder?

Each cold inlay powder is a mix of pure metal powders. Hadar’s Cold Inlay Powders are currently available in silver, gold, and black colors. The technique is called “cold inlay” because no firing is involved. Only the piece to be inlaid is fired. The inlay is done by filling the indentations of the fired piece with the inlay powder and adding a drop of CA (cyanoacrylate) glue.

Cold inlay allows you to combine metal powders that cannot be fired together because of different firing temperatures, different shrinkage rates, and compatibility. It can also be used for repair in a fraction of the time it takes to repair by firing, and it can be used in materials which cannot be fired.

Once sanded, the inlaid powder looks just like fully sintered metal.

For a demonstration of the process, please download the Instruction Manual for Hadar’s Cold Inlay Powders.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2015 at 2:25 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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