MTL - A Mouthful of Sky-high Fried Rice, Lao Tang Apprenticed on the Spot-Chapter 317 Hand drawn gold wire

  Chapter 317 Hand-drawn gold wire

   While chatting, Li Yi has already made the first bowl tire with a stamping machine.

  The effect of the stamping machine is very good. Put the processed gold sheet on the mold, and under extrusion, the gold sheet becomes a bowl-shaped carcass.

  Looking at the golden rice bowl, Wu Lei couldn't help but marvel: "This is a real golden rice bowl!"

   This bowl tire alone weighs at least half a catty.

  Half a catty of gold is more than a hundred thousand!

  Even in a wealthy family, it is a luxury to eat with such an expensive bowl.

   But this is only the first step in making cloisonne goldware, and it is also the easiest step.

  The difficulty of making cloisonné starts from filigree.

  Bringing the 1mm thick gold piece to the table, Li Yi used a ruler and a pen to draw a rectangle as big as possible on top of the gold piece.

  After that, he picked up the scissors, cut off the irregular part outside the gold piece, and trimmed the gold piece into a regular rectangle.

  Following that, he used scissors to cut the rectangular gold sheet into 1mm thick gold wires.

   Seeing Li Yi trimming the gold wire, Cai Yi and Geng Wanhua behind were a little moved.

  They were very surprised, because Li Yi pruned very fast, as if he didn't use his eyes at all, and only cut the knife with his intuition.

  But the gold wires trimmed by Li Yi are very uniform, with the same thickness.

   It made them a little bit in disbelief.

  When the expert group was re-engraving, they also wasted the boss’s effort in the step of shredding, and they reheated it countless times, and the yield rate was less than 20%.

  But every gold wire cut out by Li Yi is a finished product that can be processed, and the finished product rate has reached 100%!

   However, this is not the end.

  Li Yi took out a set of puller boards, clamped the gold wires with wire pliers, stuffed the gold wires into the holes of the wire boards, and pulled up the gold wires by hand.

   There are holes of different sizes on the wire drawing board, and the gold wire can be inserted into these holes, and then the gold wire can be drawn into finer and thinner gold wires with wire pulling pliers.

  Back, Wu Lei and others stood together, watching Li Yi's operation curiously, muttering to himself.

   "So that's what Jinsi wanted to do?"

   "It's the first time I've seen how gold wire is made."

   "The gold wire is so thin! What if it breaks?"

   "The gold flowers on those bracelets are made of this kind of gold thread, right?"

  The audience in the live broadcast room was also very curious. Many people saw how the gold thread was made for the first time.

  But when Cai Yi and Geng Wanhua saw this scene, they felt shocked!

  Li Yi is drawing gold wire by hand?

   And it still hasn't broken?

  Pull out such a thin gold wire by hand? How did he do that?

  Before the expert group imported a batch of professional wire pressing machines and wire drawing machines in order to make gold wires that fit the size when re-engraving.

  With the assistance of the machine, they pulled out the thin gold wire that could be used.

  But Li Yi actually used a wire drawing board and a wire pulling pliers to pull out the slender gold wire by hand!

  Is he a fairy?

How can this be?

   But Li Yi was pulling the gold thread in front of them without any haste, without any cover, they could see clearly.

  Those slender gold threads were really drawn by Li Yi by hand!

   This made Cai Yi and Geng Wanhua feel that the three views were about to collapse.

  Can manpower do this?

  Li Yi didn't know their shock.

   But even if he knew, Li Yi would just laugh it off.

   Pulling a 1mm gold wire is really nothing, as long as you have hands.

   Those gold and silver craftsmen in the palace, the masters of filigree inlay, can manually draw the gold wire to less than 0.07mm!

   Even the thinnest can be pulled to a diameter of 0.02mm!

  You must know that the diameter of human hair is also 0.08mm, and the gold wires used by gold and silver craftsmen are all thinner than hair.

  Compared with them, Li Yixue's job of drawing gold thread is so superficial that it can't even be considered as an introduction.

   But it is enough for filigreeing cloisonné.

  After drawing the gold wires, Li Yi brought them back to the tablet press, pressed them into flat tablets, and then hammered the gold wires straight.

   This step is to facilitate the subsequent filigree breaking, and also to gather more glaze when bluishing.

   Subsequently, he cut gold sheets of other thicknesses into gold wires and pressed them into flat sheets.

  Next, he held the gold wire with tweezers and broke the gold wire into different patterns.

  The most difficult part of filigree is breaking the work.

   Filigree requires regular workmanship, and the pinched shape must be well-proportioned, so that the effect of blue dots in the later stage will be clean and tidy.

  General apprentices have to practice breaking work for at least a few months when they learn how to cut silk.

   It took Li Yi half a year to get into the dream space.

  The camera moved close to Li Yi, taking a close-up shot.

   Standing in the distance, Li Yi's movements could no longer be seen clearly, so everyone looked at the monitor carried by the staff, which showed the details of Li Yi's filigree pattern.

  Cai Yi and Geng Wanhua took it very seriously. They were comparing Li Yi's skills with the difference between the original expert group's replica.

   After comparison, they were surprised to find that Li Yi's skill level was much more professional than that of the expert group!

  The filigree technique used by Li Yi is completely different from the one reproduced by the expert group.

  He used a double-hook and double-thread filigree method to produce a very plump and gorgeous lotus pattern with a full pattern.

  Looking at Li Yi's exquisite technique, Cai Yi and Geng Wanhua exchanged glances, and they both saw the shock in each other's eyes.

  This filigree method saves more than half of the time compared with the single-thread filigree method of the expert group, and the finished product is much better than the expert group.

  They all had some doubts. Could this be the real technique of filigreeing cloisonné objects in history?

   Soon, Li Yi finished all the filigree patterns on a bowl.

  In addition to the twining lotus, there are also the variant Kuilonghui pattern on the mouth of the bowl, the lotus petal pattern on the bottom of the bowl, the four characters of Wanshou Wujiang on the wall of the bowl, and the inscription of descendants Yongbao on the bottom.

  The four-character seal script inscription "Zi Sun Yong Bao" in the bottom center is the core of this set of bowls.

   Its first three characters are taken from the seal script font that Qianlong himself inscribed, and the last treasure character was carefully designed into a special font by the cloisonné craftsman.

  The word "treasure" contains the meaning of "king" and "eight hundred thousand longevity", which happened to coincide with the happy event of Qianlong's eightieth birthday at that time.

  Especially the arc of the last stroke is very special. It is different from the conventional seal script.

  So, if you don’t know the meaning of this layer, if you copy this set of bowls without a reference, you will be able to see the authenticity at a glance.

   After breaking all the patterns, the next step is to weld them to the gold tire.

   This step is also the difficulty.

  It is not easy to make the pattern firmly adhere to the carcass, so that it will not fall off or leave traces during the calcination process.

  The expert group tried countless adhesive materials, such as chemical glue, biological glue, and even iron wire binding, but the results were not satisfactory.

  The final calcined carcass, the bond between the pattern and the carcass is always not firm, there will be gaps, and it is easy to fall off.

  So, when Li Yi was taking this step, Cai Yi and Geng Wanhua took it very seriously.

   5

  (end of this chapter)