Silver elven USB flash drive

Intro

The old legends say that the ancient elves could memorise all their knowledge and wisdom. But over time elven culture started to decline along with their abilities. Elves could no longer rely on their memory and were forced to develop technology to help them keep the wisdom safe. This path led them to an era of digital storage drives which were fast, durable and as everything else in elven culture – astonishingly decorated.

Inspired by this fantasy sci-fi story I imagined an ancient drawing of how such device could look like and set off to a challenge to produce a really cool elven-looking USB stick.

This story really got stuck in my mind. I even purchased a tiniest Goodram USB drive. However, I struggled viciously to sketch it out on paper and at some point I decided to just start it and go with the flow.The first thing to do is to disassemble the USB stick. Surprisingly it wasn’t too easy as I assume it is not deigned to be taken apart. Google wasn’t too helpful in this case either, but I managed to get rid of plastic outer body and left with a neat bear metal USB block.

The main frame

Thankfully this model has little ledges on both sides which I will use to set it in the new frame. It is extremely important to make the setting frame right as it will hold the entire pendant together.

So I started with wrapping a 1mm wire around the USB block as tight as possible to get a good grip. I actually made it even a bit smaller to be able to fit it with higher accuracy by gradually grinding off the inside cavity.

The setting frame is basically 3 joint rectangular rings with the middle one is slightly wider than the outer ones. This is needed to get nice little grooves on both sides of the frame where the ledges will sit and hold the USB block firmly in place.

Even though I wanted to I could not make a test fitting of the setting frame as probably I would not be able to undo it. Hence I went on with the rest of the decorative frame. I used the same 1mm wire for the floral elven-like elements. I found it very handly to use a steel wire to hold pieces together while soldering.

The entire pendant is not going to be flat which makes filling in the filigree a little harder. All decorative elements must have the filigree already soldered in before the final assemble.

Soldering the setting frame to the first decorative frame finally gave me a feeling of how the entire pendant would look like. And I liked it. From that moment on it was downhill – I made another decorative frame similar to the first one and attached it to the setting frame.

The cap

Forging the cap for the elven-look USB drive was not supposed to be that complicated. I started with making a rectangular ring out of 1mm wire that fits tightly the USB block. Then I made two similar decorative frames and soldered them to the cap ring.

The difficult part came to my mind a bit late. How will this cap hold itself on the main frame? In the original plastic cap there are tiny ledges on the inside walls that are aligned with the USB port square holes. I could have gone this road before the cap was assembled, but now it was not an option.

So I decided to try another way by adding a springy clamp on both sides of the cap. These clamps should be able to click onto the setting frame and stay robust enough to hold the cap in place. The unexpected fact for me was that silver is not awfully springy and there is no wide know way to make it act that way. Luckily I know a few real goldsmith professionals who recommended me few tricks to try. Although hardening silver through heat treatment is quite complicated process, gentle hammering on the claps seemed to work just fine.

Photoshoot

Once both parts of the pendant are nicely polished and cleaned out I test those clams by taking the cap off and putting it back on few dozen times. It is truly mesmerising.

I do hope that if elves were amongst us they would be pleased by this interpretation of their technology era. Enjoy the photoshoot!