Hi,

I'm new to this forum and fairly new to all things jewellery but I'm trying all sorts of new things. One thing I have experimented with is metal clay but I'm struggling with the copper version, can anyone help please?

Silver clay I can fire fine on the gas hob but I've bought a torch to help me with the Art clay Copper. Still, everything seems underfired and crumbly! Could I be a) not firing correctly? I'm heating to cherry red (and I've tried brighter) for at least 10 minutes (and I've tried samples for longer)
b) being a bit of a dunce with the torch?! I have a little Silverline one, it takes butane fuel and claims to reach 1300C. That said I don't seem to be able to ball up sterling or copper wire in it. Is there a trick to filling it correctly perhaps? Could that be why I'm not getting the correct temperature? (I'm struggling to light the flame sometimes and it doesn't seem to burn for very long)

Any thoughts would be very gratefully received as I'm thinking of abandoning the copper as a bad job but was hoping I use the torch for soldering etc

Thank you!
Nammie