| Original Message: How identical cloison wires are made |
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Accounts of cloisonne manufacture in post-1950 decades often refer to "machine made" products, but no one ever showed the machines, despite numerous factory tour pictures and videos on the web. Then one of the Chinese cloisonne blogs mentioned that old master artist Jin Shiquan invented a machine to make duplicate wires to avoid the tedious process of bending them one by one. So I purchased the Chinese book about him from Amazon, and sure enough, there were pages and pages of pictures showing heretofore unknown details of cloison manufacture. Here's his "machine," and a picture of how the multi-wire bands are hand-formed into shapes matching a drawn pattern template. Co-workers of Jin Shiquan relate how he could apply the wires directly to the copper surface without having to match them up to a template - because he was a very good draughtsman, apparently, judging from his sketches and design illustrations. He also seems to be the artist responsible for the new style of dragon that appears after 1950. Other photos show how the shaped wired clusters are then annealed and cleaned before being glued to the copper surface. Online photos of the technicians who do this work show small bent-copper-sheet trays containing the cloison wires, and thanks to the book photos I learned that these are the little trays that hold the wires as they're put into the annealing kiln. It's quite a lengthy process involving many steps. All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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