Custom Silver Meat Cleaver Charm

I've been sooooooo busy recently I've hardly had time to post here at all, but trying to do it more regularly.

Had a really fun commission last week to make a meat cleaver charm as a leaving present for a roller derby league's coach.  He's a butcher and they wanted to incorporate his skate number, 8oz into it.

Actually remembered to do some work in progress shots for once!  Started with flat silver sheet, and cut out the basic shape, before filing down the blade part so that the handle was thicker.  I wanted it to look like a very traditional cleaver, so I drilled some holes to hammer rivets through at the end. 



I've been trying to have a bit of a go at simple engraving recently, so decided to engrave a wood texture on the handle - turned out quite well actually, although you can't really see it in this picture!  Also filed a bevel for the edge of the blade.



Cut out the really tiny skate number.  That was fun. 

All ready for soldering:

And all finished and polished up, with the rivets hammered through the handle!

 
Cute, huh?

Right, back to the workbench - I have wedding jewellery to finish off and a ton of shiny roller derby related things to get done.