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Jan 25

I have seen many countertops in my years of living but I never knew the amount of work that went into a counter like this! The insane amount of work required to do this by hand is beyond what I would ever have imagined.

What makes this so unique?
Well, it turns out hammered copper can only really be made in two ways: heavy-duty specialty equipment, or one hammer strike at a time by hand. Being the underdogs we are, we didn’t back down from the challenge. To pass the time, David even taped the hammers to his hands. I attached a video for you all to see the genius at work. The team worked in shifts to give our wrists and elbows a break. It doesn’t take long to get tendonitis doing something like this.

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One of the very unique challenges a job like this presents is the material science, specific to forming copper.
Copper is a material that, when hammered or presented with a lot of friction, hardens. So, Sean and David, the more it was hammered/worked with, the more rigid the material became. Once the sheet is being hammered, it starts to stretch. This causes the material to bow and arc, as shown in the picture.
With this happening, it became apparent something had to hold it down or this countertop was going to turn into a bowl rather quickly.

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Eventually, the material became so rigid that it wasn’t possible to continue working on it. The team, mainly Sean, blasted the copper with a large propane torch to anneal the copper while David hammered it flat as the tension left the material. And then the hammering could begin again. When the hammering was done the sheet had grown nearly 3 inches in length from how much the sheet had stretched. We estimate there were over 400,000 hammer strikes to complete the sheet, not including all the hammering we had to do to keep the sheet flat!

After dozens of cycles of hammering, heating, flattening, and hammering again, (you know, rinse and repeat as many times as you have to) the sheet was complete and ready to be made into a countertop.