Complete Metalsmith, Professional Edition | Tim McCreight

Complete Metalsmith, Professional Edition | Tim McCreight | teaching tool - super!

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Complete Metalsmit...

	Complete Metalsmith, Professional Edition Tim McCreight Brynmorgen Press, 2004 - 312 pages average customer review:based on 35 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

No wonder.....

No wonder this book is THE first book recommended by metalsmiths. This book gives great detail about all aspects of the craft. I see it staying on my bench from now on.

teaching tool - super!

So well illustrated explanations are great, book lies flat, a wonder for those of us that do not have teachers around. Just what I needed to give me confidence.

Complete Metalsmith, Professional Edition

Wow! Great for people who want to know EVERYTHING about making jewelery. I really appreciated the clear instructions, visual layouts, and the levels of each craft described. This edition describes the homemade version, the tools you can make or buy, as well as the more industrial method for almost every technique covered in the book.

Clear and concise, each metal is presented from the periodic table giving a description of it's properties. Great for scientists types and for people who want to create their products in historic ways at home.

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Not flawless, maybe VS1

This book has been very helpful to me in my jewelry-making course. The explanations are generally clear and Mr. McCreight covers a wide variety of topics. I've bought several books on metalsmithing, but this is the one I go to first to familiarize myself with a new technique before trying it out. I wouldn't want to use this book to teach myself metalsmithing; some explanations that seem very clear in the comfort of your study turn out to be just a bit terse when you're at your bench alone with the book and a lump of metal that resists becoming a piece of jewelry. But with the help of a teacher who can fill in the gaps, this book is very useful indeed.

My decision to award this book four stars is due mainly to flaws in the tables at its end. For instance, one table reports that the number of Troy ounces in a Troy pound is the same as the number of Troy ounces in a pound avoirdupois, a bit over 14. Another tells us that the conversion factor for going from 18kt gold to platinum (how much more the same volume of platinum will weigh) is the same as the conversion factor for going from silver to platinum, about 2.06, thus wrongly telling us that silver and 18kt gold have the same density. Those are just the errors I caught as I casually looked over the tables. They shake my confidence in the other numbers provided and convince me I'd better get out my calculator and my CRC manual to verify those tables before relying on them.

Tables like these are usually taken from other sources and compiled by assistants, so I expect those errors are errors either of transcription or in the source material. In the area in which he's expert, metal smithing, Mr. McCreight has been a sure teacher who hasn't led me astray. It would be a very good idea, however, for someone to fix those tables. They do reduce confidence in an otherwise excellent book. Pictures and more illustrations would really help clarify some of the explanations in the text.

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An excellent overview

This book provides a wonderfully complete overview of a wide variety of silversmithing techniques. It doesn't provide detailed how-to instructions; if you are new to metalsmithing you will probably need additional instruction, but it is still a very useful resource. I learned a lot from it.

reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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