Today in my quest to use as much of the object as possible I had a fabulous idea to use the watch bands that were still in good condition. I decided to use polymer clay and parts from other watches to fill the face area. I even put the back on the first two I did so everything would stay inside.
Great idea, right?
WRONG!
Apparently the clay expands slightly while baking. The first two I did popped the fronts off while baking. Oh, well. I painted them with liquid polymer and rebaked them. It still looks cool and that's the important thing.So that problem was fixed.
But while I was baking those first two, I made another. Since I didn't know about the expanding of the clay, I tried to put the back on that one too. Note that I said "tried." For some reason, it refused to go on. So being the engineering genius I am, I grabbed a flat pliers and tried to force it back. That was not the best course of action. I heard a nice loud crack and looked to see that I had cracked the glass. And yes, I still kept trying to squeeze the back on but eventually gave up.
So now I had two with fronts and no backs and one that had neither a front or back.
Only two more to go. Ok, since putting the back on before baking pushed the front out, I decided to just put the clay in the front and leave the back off, hoping to put it on after baking.
I baked the last two and everything looked great. I set everything aside to cool. A few hours later I picked up one of the bracelets. It looked great no problems. I finally had success. But of course the back will not fit. Not too big of a problem. I can make that work.
I then picked up the last one. It came up easily enough but when I looked down, there was the clay. Still sitting on my cooling rack. Back to the drawing board. I think a bit of liquid poly and maybe some metal glue will fix it.
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