My ongoing apprenticeship at Backwoods Tin & Copper has been mostly obsessed with finishing up the copper jambonnière pan – not least because we wanted to have it done to show at the tinsmith convergence in Indiana this month.

So the craziness continued.

Tinning the copper jambonnière in the flat.

After finally creating the bottom pattern that seemed to work, we set about organizing the sides of the jambonnière. Besides knowing they should be about 8” high, we had to figure out a length and a process. This, apparently, was another part where we had to make a few examples and mess up a few  more times.  (I’m starting to realize that creating a new pattern from scratch is about 65% of making copper and tin wares…)

Preparing the sides for wiring.

Bob finally was able to figure out that putting the wire in when the two sides were joined as a huge circle was the best way to handle it, but that was only after we’d tried to form the sides on the hollow mandrel first, and then wire it. We ended up poking the steel out of the soft tinned copper.

Whoops.

And then there was the math. I’m not very good at math, which is why my husband handles the company accounting for House Copper, etc (thank heaven!) but this tinsmithing math also deals with fractions. Which, to me, is even worse, because they’re never normal fractions – a gripe I often voice when at the tinshop. I believe after Bob tinkered for hours after I left (read: defeated and needing to get my children from school), he ended up with sides that measured 26 5/16”.

Forming the sides of the jambonnière by hand on the hollow mandrel.

But we still had to free-hand form the sides to match the base, and then create a jig to fit inside the jambonnière base that we then sawed apart and screwed back together in order to create a tight enough structure to allow for seam setting.

We spent more time measuring and creating jigs than we actually did making the base!  But the bottom seam is set, and then we soldered it with a lot of heat.

Setting down the base seam of the jambonnière

Next will be some time to organize a cover that fits our insane bottom pan shape.

If something ends up measuring something along the lines of 26 15/16” I think I might cry.