Dragon Reliquary

So for my final project in my beginning metals class, my teacher requested us to make a Reliquary for just about anything. Being that I have an obsession with dragons, I chose to do that. The stuff inside are sheds from my bearded dragons so I can say there's dragon skin in it. Its a rather small box, its only about 3 inches long, 1 inch wide, and 1 inch tall, there's a different dragon-y image on every side except for the base

I'm going to call this the project of broken saws... Why? Because I'm pretty sure I broke at least 15 saws on this thing. I did a loooot of cutting and I'm pretty sure whatever saws I got from the start of the semester were kinda cheap. And they liked to snap even when I wasn't doing anything.

Being that this was the end of the semester, I was kind of running out of metal. Aside from whatever scraps came out of this, that was the last of my brass sheet metal that I had, and the base of the box is made out of copper.

Now, soldering this thing together was fun, especially since the solder didn't want to cooperate in the way that I wanted to, especially not on the hinges. There was even a point on the hinge where it actually melted the brass due to me heating it for so long trying to get the solder to flow right. ~.~ This part was on the dragon's head that was on the lid. I tried to salvage it by hammering the head a bit, which kind of worked.

If I were to do this again... I would have cut out a small section from the edge of the lid so the hinges would fit in nicely and not have that giant gap there, or just try to solder on a longer hinge. I tried the longer hinge part before but it wasn't working(Seeing as the solder just wanted to flood itself all over the tube and not go anywhere on the sheet) so I just put on what I could.


Anyways... It was kind of a fun project. Enjoy!


Detail shots: [link]