Agate Pendant

Ok change of plans. I had originally envisioned making some stud earrings for myself but decided at the last minute to make a pendant instead. The instructor cautioned that if I went with studs it would be very easy to break off the earring posts when I went to set the stones. Since you can't apply heat to metal after setting stones, I wouldn't have been able to re-solder the posts back on or do a whole lot with my finished cabochon settings if I had been so unfortunate.

I decided to switch gears and make a pendant using my two settings. If I had planned this properly I would have selected different sized stones, or different stones altogether, just to make it more interesting.  In the end

Here is the agate pendant with the cabochons set. Finishing this piece off proved to be much more frustrating and challenging than I had thought. The truly frustrating part was keeping the pendant fixed using the waxy resin. The problem was that the resin was considerably contaminated from being used in previous classes so it did a very poor job of holding the pieces in place while I set the stones.

After about the twelfth time of it coming loose (and having made little progress on setting the stones) the instructor gave me a pitch pot of which there was only one for the whole class. The tar in the pitch pot was unbelievably  more effective in securing the settings than the resin and I was able to complete my pendant with far less cursing!

Agate Earrings

After finishing up with the silver band ring I started on my final project in the Jewellery I course. We were learning about cabochons and bezel settings for our next ring project but I was leaning towards making a pair of stud earrings instead.  Here are the Botswana Agate cabochons I picked up along Queen street. In this photo I just finished hammering out the walls of the bezel setting using the bezel mandrel.

Silver Band Ring

This silver band ring project was designed to make us practice our soldering, sawing, and polishing techniques.  We all started with a strip of silver 10mm wide.  After hammering, bending, and soldering the silver strip into a simple band ring we had to divide the ring into equal sections and add our own designs to each piece.  The final challenge was to solder the equal pieces back into a single ring.  Sound difficult? It was!

After my first soldering attempt the solder hadn't completely filled to edge of the gap so I had to add more after cleaning off the layer of oxidization. 

It took me a whole hour to saw the band ring into 3 pieces of equal width because I was trying to keep the cuts as straight as possible. The extra time it took me to saw the band ring paid off in the end because I didn't have to do nearly as much filing as I had feared to get the sides parallel with each other. In the end when I stacked the rings back together I measured about 9mm so I only lost 1mm in the process.

You can see the simple design I chose for the three pieces. I used the saw blade to cut the grooves in the middle ring and then filed semi-circles into the edges of the three pieces.

Here is the finished band ring after I soldered it all back together again. It turned out well on the outside but not great on the inside, which is better than having the opposite happen but is not completely satisfying.

The soldering went relatively well and none of it got into the grooves of the pattern, however I could have been more precise when wiring the three thin rings together into a stack to begin with. The middle piece was out of centre by a few fractions of a millimeter which was evident when I went to file the outside. I managed to file away the solder grooves from the outside except where they were intentionally left as part of the pattern on the top. Unfortunately You can see two thin dark lines on the inside of the ring where the solder grooves were.  Eventually the instructor told me to stop filing because the ring was getting too thin.  My OCD made that a challenge to do!