red heat patina on foldformed copper bracelet 

Yes, quick quench will sometimes get you nice reds, and you'll sometimes get them just randomly as well. Flux makes it more consistent.

@@ReedCBowman I was told the dish soap makes the quench slower, and noticed a difference if I add more dish soap

I know of that method, how do deal with larger pieces? I've done it with smaller pieces but a bracelet feels too big to maintain the constant heat with the torch.

David Villarreal turn a regular torch into a forced air burner. A hair dryer would be enough added air. Poke the screen at the start/end of the barrel with a needle. Just do one hole to start since that may be plenty depending on the size of your heating area and the angle of your fuel and air feed. Mix up any kind of cement with speed set. Keep the mix as dry as you can manage and use something to shape it. I went with a propane can Inner dimension and 6 inch round duct for my outer. Set that in a couple globs for keep it from rolling. Drill a hole in the back for air. Then aim the gas hole in a spiraling out angle. Good luck and enjoy bud! I mixed all my dry mix then kept it in a bucket. If I don’t like how my test hole works I can fill it fast. This way I can keep adjusting

On this video I was using propane, because it was for an Instructable and I figured lots of people would have access to that. But normally I use Oxyacetylene. Bracelets, especially thin ones, are a piece of cake to heat up really fast to get those nice reds. When you get up to a couple of pounds of thicker sheet on my medium and large vases it gets difficult. I use a huge rosebud tip then and it can still be hard to get good reds. STL's suggestion of essentially creating a miniature blast furnace might work for larger things.

He used an oxygen torch for fast heating as explained in the text. The less red pieces were propane heated.

@@mjremy2605 ok.

It is usually fairly durable. Sometimes it will absorb water from the air and get a white film. When it does, we rinse that off and dry it, and after a round or two of this it will usually stabilize. At that point you can re-coat the object with wax or acrylic or lacquer, and it should be good for a while. Outdoors, the reds usually darken slowly over time to a red-brown. If you wear the object or handle it a lot, the side against your skin will react and darken and eventually turn green (or possibly quickly, depending on your skin chemistry). We coat our bracelets in acrylic or lacquer, but regular wear will wear through that. One more thing: sometimes you will get a lot of change, usually from a lighter, lower temperature red to a paler orange or pink or tan color, in the first few hours after you stop. This doesn't seem to be controllable, and it doesn't happen all the time, or even all that often. But it's why we let our work sit for a day just like with our ordinary patinas to dry and stabilize before coating them the first time. If we really don't like where it's gone in the first day, we'll reheat it to try again, just like if we didn't like it the moment it cooled.

That is true! Never thought of that.

Yes, you do. But it takes just a small bit of flexing it to begin to work harden it again. If you have it the perfect size, you just grip it and twist gently back and forth a few times, or run the edges between your fingers, and it will harden up considerably. But we like to leave them as annealed as we can so that people can adjust them to the perfect fit and shape when they buy them.

Spray acrylic. On small pieces such as earrings, I instead dip them in thinned lacquer.

No, the reds really only come out on pure copper. Every once in awhile you'll get a durable red patch on bronze, brass, or nickel brass, but it's always a surprise and always just some patch where it was against another piece of metal and/or had extra flux, and it doesn't seem to be doable if you're trying.

@@ReedCBowman teres a way to get red on bronze_¡?

Sorry to be so slow to reply. It varies. I make a thin slurry, I would say anywhere from 1:3 to 1:6 borax to water by volume.

I don't clean off any of the patina. Since the blacks and reds are fully reacted, they will tend to react more slowly than bare copper would when wearing the bracelet inevitably wears through the acrylic coating. I think it looks better anyway.