[Hoot]

After I first saw the sintered copper disk, comprised of what must be thousands of tiny copper beads, I did a little reading on the process. The individual beads are shaped in the form you want them to wind up as, then heated so that they barely reach their melting point, but not far enough so that they become entirely liquified. Wherever they touch one another they melt first and if you stop the heat once that has occurred, they are all bonded, quite strongly to one another. If you examine a model of spheres piled together, they only touch each other in small places, leaving plenty of space for air or liquid to pass between them, while providing lots of surface area in contact with whatever is pasing through them. The idea with the block was that water entering the matrix would drive downward and quickly divert into many random directions, eventually reaching the bottom of the matrix. Thats why I said the optimum thickness of the disk would have to be determined through experimentation, such that it wipes the liquid a lot while not deterring it from striking the baseplate too much. Probably the biggest challenge would arise in finding a satisfactory method for bonding the disk to the baseplate. Loading the beads onto an already made silver plate probably would not work since the sintering temperature of copper is higher than the melting point of pure silver. You could take the sintered disk and place it into the mold used for casting a molten silver plate and pour the silver onto it. Hopefully the viscosity of molten silver would be great enough that it would not flow too far into the copper matrix. Another approach would be to saturate the disk with wax and then mill off the wax on one face of the disk, exposing the copper beads. Then, if you have access to a plating tank, you could plate that face until the pores totally clog with silver and finally the deposition would build up until the surface was plated thick enough to mill back to flat. Once you have that accomplished, you could warm the disk and melt out the wax. I don't have all the answers, just a starting point for ponderance. The diagram did not convert very well from a .bmp to .jpg format to allow the matrix to show the detail of its composition, but again, it was just a starting point. If you go to some of the sintering web pages and look at finished products, you can get a better mental image of where I was headed.

Hoot