Reflections of an amateur mirror maker

I was introduced to the idea of a bronze mirror by a friend, Ping-Kern Ng, and after this idea fermented a little I sawed out two 150mm discs of 1.7mm thick silicon bronze supplied by Columbia Metals Ltd, taped them together and then sawed out an arc for the hinge about 20mm from the edge. The ensemble was clamped in a vice with the cut uppermost, and I used a graver to cut out a groove for a 3mm hinge. Later in the process I swapped from a graver to a home-made chisel using 3mm diameter silver steel, the end cut at 45 degrees and hardened. I made some 3mm diameter silicon bronze tube from sheet then sawed five bronze knuckles for the hinge from it, wired them to the bronze disks and tacked them with solder.

The discs were carefully taken apart after cooling, pickled and dried, then I had to 'flush' the solder for all the knuckles. Each disk was separate fluxed at the knuckles and heated until the solder ran under all areas of each knuckle. Unfortunately, this warped both sheets to various extents.

The most warped mirror plate was jammed between two steel plates and heated to 550C in a furnace to flatten it, then both mirror plates were carefully fitted together and flattened again in the same way, resulting in virtually a perfect fit. I then had to correct a slight warp / misalignment on a couple of the knuckles as in the last picture, in which I used graphite pencil leads as a core to maintain stability before reheating to melt the solder (which was virtually pure silver).
The pictures below show the face which I polished (along with a more photogenic view than usual of the maker and his camera) contrasting with the other faces, which I did not. In fact, on the outside one face has an oxide 'design' which I may well decide to amend.