Making A Bronze Mirror From Scratch

Although modern-day silvered glass mirrors have pretty much destroyed the market for bronze mirrors, these highly polished pieces of metal once were the pinnacle of mirror technology. Due to the laborious process required these mirrors saw use essentially only by the affluent. That said, how hard would it be to make a bronze mirror today with all of the modern technologies that even a hobbyist can acquire for their shed? Cue [Lundgren Bronze Studios] giving it a shot, starting by casting something flat-ish to start polishing.

Just getting that initial shape to start polishing is a chore, with hammering out the shape possibly being also a viable method. When casting metal it’s tricky to avoid having air bubbles and other defects forming, though using a sand mold seems to help a lot.

After you have the rough shape, polishing using power tools seems like cheating, but as you can see in the video even going from 50 to 8000 grit with a rotating disc left countless scratches. Amusingly, hand sanding did a much better job of removing the worst scratches, following which a polishing compound helped to bring out that literal mirror finish.

A quick glance at the Wikipedia entry for bronze mirrors shows that a tin-bronze alloy like speculum metal was used for thousands of years as it was much easier to polish to a good mirror finish. The metallurgy of what may seem like just a vanity item clearly goes deeper than just polishing up a metal surface.