Forged Candle Holders

Background

Recently, I was asked to make some items for a charity auction. Given that I had neither the time nor materials to make, in my mind, an auction-worthy knife, I made some simple candle holders instead. Now, these particular ones are for tea lights, but if there is interest I'll make a post about a set I made for the tall kind of candles.

The Build

I started out not having any real idea of what I wanted to have these look like, except that the main platform would be a sunken piece made from a square cutoff. So, the first thing I did was cut a 2x2in square out of 1/8in steel.

Next, I heated the piece up and using a hammer with a face 1.75in diameter, I sunk the steel into a piece of wood. This works because the softer wood compresses down as you hit it, and also chars, weakening the wood further. After several cycles of this, I was left with this as my result.

Though difficult to see, the corners flare up as a result of the concave center.

The next stage was to repeat that whole process, as I was making a pair. Yay, hand forging two things separately that need to match!

The last component I needed now was a set of legs or stand of some sort. On their own, the platforms would just be rolling around, and simply wouldn't work well. So what I did was cut two .75x2in strips of the 1/8in metal I made the holders out of. I needed to have a smooth look to the finished product, but at the same time I didn't want them to be perfectly symmetrical on all sides. My solution was take each strip and cold work it by securing it in a vice and hammering it into a curve that would watch that of its companion platform, which needed .

1 curve matched the bottom of the holder/platform, and the other curved back down to rest at surface level. This meant that the holder would be ed, retain the curving themes, and not be perfectly symmetrical. A side view looks like this:

The last things to do were secure the handles/stand bits to the handle and finishing work, like polishing and cleaning. To secure the stands, I applied some metal glue to hold it in place temporarily, then welded them together. I use a pretty cheap flux-core wire welder, and am a pretty bad welder, so it ended up covered in spatter and rather messy, but I remedied this in the finishing work.

Finishing Work

My first order of business was to fix the mess welding had caused. I simply grabbed a metal file and some 100grit sandpaper and filed away all the problems.

Next, I needed to clean the pieces. I attached a wire brush attachment to my drill, and went over both holders several times until I got a dull, silvery shine. A quick coat of oil, and they were done!