by Sharon.
I recently started stamping and I think I’m doing a pretty good job for a newbie.
My question is, do all blanks get kind of scratched / slightly rough in the back after stamping? I noticed this on most of my blanks and wonder if there’s a way to clean up or buff this?
Help please!!
Sharon
The best way to deal with marks on metal is not to make them… or so my silversmithing teacher told us. You could try padding your surface with masking tape. If that fails, you would need to sand out the marks. You could then buff to a shine, add a texture, or whatever works with your design.
When I first started to get into metal stamping, my husband brought home a small piece of scrap metal for me to use as the stamping block – the 2 main sides are flat, but there are small ridges on the narrow sides. One day I decided to see what sort of texture that would give me – and I love it! So now I either do my actual stamping on the edges or finish the piece by gently using a chasing hammer so I get that pretty texture all over the back of my piece. A Flaw? Nope, just an opportunity to get creative! Have fun!
Hi, Sharon. What I do with some metal blanks that are scratched on the back side of the pieces is lay them flat on a non-mar surface (back side up), take one of my sandpaper sticks and sand the back of the piece in one constant direction, either North to South, East to West, diagonal or cross hatched. It adds texture to the underside as well as camouflaging the scratch marks. Depending on how deep the scratches are, this technique works most of the time. Hope this helps.
I removed scratches by rubbing with #0000 steel wool. Tumbling with stainless steel shot also works great. Good luck!
Thank you for the feedback!!!
Hi Sharon, I have had success with taping a piece of this plastic to my steel block, such as used in laminating. The plastic eventually gets marked up, but I just replace it. No marks at all on the backs of my blanks.