Pure silver is a highly ductile and malleable metal with the relatively low melting point of 1761 degrees Fahrenheit. Sterling silver melts at an even lower temperature, so only 15 or 20 minutes in the forge, with constant use of the bellows, would be enough to melt the crucible’s charge. Most impurities in the metal would be sopped up by the porous graphite of the crucible itself. The molten metal was then poured out into a two-piece cast iron ingot mold or into an open mold called a “skillet.” In either case, the cooling metal released any oxygen it might have absorbed in the form of spitting bubbles that left the surface of the ingot pitted with tiny holes.
If the piece of work to be made was a small ornament, it would be cast directly in a sand mold formed by the smith around a pattern of his own making. The acorn-like finials atop teapots or on the covers of tankards were normally made by casting, often a dozen at a time.
Perhaps, however, some customer ordered a simple, straight-sided silver cup, too large to be cast. Our smith could have made it by any one of three methods and the result would be the same in size, shape, weight, and appearance. Generally only another silversmith could hope to tell which was made by which process: forging, raising, or seaming.
To forge such a cup the silversmith would have taken a billet of silver perhaps 3/16 inches thick and from it cut a disk of the same diameter as the lip of the finished cup. Then by careful and repeated hammer blows, using shaped anvils of the proper size and curvature, he would pound the metal into the form he required.
To raise a cup, the smith would start with silver in the form of a flat sheet as thick (or thin) as he wanted the cup to be. He would have made the sheet himself, of course, by beating an ingot to the required thinness. From the sheet he would cut a disk whose diameter equalled the average diameter plus the average height of the finished cup. By carefully hammering the silver just beyond the edge of the anvil, he would force the metal around the outer part of the disk to rise and “shrink” until the cup was shaped.
To make a seamed cup the smith would again use thin sheet, cutting from it a small round piece for the bottom of the cup and a slightly curved oblong piece to form its side. He would roll the latter into a somewhat cone-shaped cylinder and solder together the edges. Then he would solder the small disk into the lower end of the cylinder so that the cup was formed. This was by far the quickest and easiest method of making hollow ware. The silversmith’s solder is itself composed predominantly of silver.
Whatever method the smith used to form the cup, he would finish it by a process known as planishing. In this procedure the small irregularities in the surface of the piece are carefully hammered smooth by repeated, deft blows of a flat, polished hammer. The face of the planishing anvil is likewise polished to mirror-like smoothness. After planishing would come the filing off of burrs in crevices of the design, and then an all-over polishing with pumice, tripoli, and rouge. At this point the piece would have been ready for surface ornamentation—by engraving, chasing, or repoussé.
Engraving means the cutting of a design into the surface of the work; some metal is removed in the process. Chasing is the impression of a design on the surface by the use of appropriately shaped punches. Repoussé consists of raising a design, somewhat like bas relief, by hammering from the back or inside of the work. In the second and third techniques the metal is displaced but not removed.
Shown here are a few of the larger anvils and stakes on which the silversmiths shaped their silver into the finished articles. Since the silversmith had no tool the exact shape of the articles he made, he had to employ many different shaped tools in the process of manufacture. DIDEROT.