The aluminum flashing is razor sharp along the edges, so cutting by hand with shears can result in some nasty cuts. So I broke out the trusty air tools. This air shear glides through the flashing like an air-powered hot knife through metallic butter.

And here’s the finished product. Keep in mind this was done as a practice run to get familiar with the shapes and methods for this piece. The final production pieces will be made from real brass sheet.

For an upcoming event we realized the need for several metal victrola phonograph horns. After searching the web and finding that brass replicas cost several hundred dollars each, I decided to try our hand at fabricating them myself. The ultimate goal is to make these from sheet brass with soldered joints. For practice I built one from .010″ thick aluminum roll flashing (the kind that roofers use, available at Lowes and Home Depot for much cheaper than brass). Rather than attempt to weld the aluminum, I chose rivets, which are fast and cheap, but don’t look great.

First step was to trace the pattern of an individual panel (leaf) from a real horn. I used the one that forms the business end of Sir Quincy’s Sonic Blunderbuss. Then I cut the pattern out of thick craft roll paper.

Next I traced the pattern onto aluminum flashing and hand cut a few leaves using tin snips. This was a laborious and sometimes bloody ordeal. I scored the edges with a brass pulley that I pressed into the aluminum by rolling it along the edges. Then I folded the edges up at an angle.

Next I drilled 1/8″ holes through the matching edges of the leaves and used short aluminum rivets to hold the pieces together.

After doing two of these, I realized that I needed to improve my methods if this was going to be something repeatable and safe. So in the next post I’ll show how I moved up to a better tool for the job.