A: Of the ones I’ve used, there are two main lever types. One is the Techno style, including the original Techno, and there are at least two versions or copies now available, one Swiss and the other American-made. The other style is now sold by Foredom as their number 18. I forget who the original manufacturer or designer was. The number 10 you’ve got is, I think, simply the Italian Faro design in the Foredom USA-made version, otherwise identical so far as I can tell with the original Faro. Fordom also sells one listed as the number 180 in Gesswein’s catalog, but I’m not familiar with it.

The Faro #10 was for a long time the one I used, and still do use on occasion. The lever is sometimes a bit short for total ease of use, but always worked fine for me. Its main drawback is that the lever operates a friction-fit cam mechanism, so if you use the lever a lot when the handpiece is still rotating, you’ll wear out that cam rather quickly, though it’s not that hard to replace. And the nose bearings seem to have a somewhat shorter life than I’d like.

The Techno types have longer levers, and the lever operates a ball bearing mechanism, so operating the lever with the shaft still rotating doesn’t hurt it. You can, if you wish, change burs with the motor still clipping along at a decent speed if the burs are something you can grab or otherwise flip out without injury. And the bearings are completely replaceable. But smaller hands might find the Techno slightly more awkward to hold. I’m not sure why, but it feels a little odd in the hand, although I’m used to it now.

The number 18, at least the one I’ve got, uses a lever you press in towards the body of the handpiece. In use, the lever juts out away from the handpiece. I find that quite awkward, and at least on mine, the mechanism takes considerable force to operate, and makes a rather grating sound while doing so. It’s not a pleasant handpiece at all, and I almost never use the thing.

A: A good craftsman could make the same blade with either a good anvil or a piece of junk steel. I recall way back in the ’60s, while travelling to Cozumel with my parents, we went over to the ruins at Chichen Itza. It wasn’t then the big tourist center it is now, and we got a ride from a fellow at the air strip into the little town adjacent to the ruins, and wandered around there a bit before heading to the ruins themselves. I saw a number of interesting little shops where they were doing all sorts of crafts. One in particular sticks in my memory. The guy in it was making silver and stone-inlay jewelry. It was pretty typical; the sort of stuff one finds even today. Colorful inlay patterns of turquoise, coral, black onyx (or other things pretending to be them). It was decently made for what it was and the low prices being asked.

But here’s the thing: the guy’s whole workshop basically existed in those small spaces in his garage not taken up by his truck, and mostly in the dirt or gravel driveway itself. He had a small table set up and was working at it. Grinding, polishing, “lapidary” grinding, all was done on a small hand-cranked grinder, the type that used to be sold for sharpening knives. Soldering was done with a beat-up gasoline blow torch. His anvil was just a chunk of truck axle cut and jammed into a large wooden stump of some sort. Careful gentle hammering was done with a beat-up carpenter’s hammer. And when he was ready to inlay the stones, he’d glue them in with a black adhesive his kid gathered from the middle of the road where the sun had warmed the asphalt paving enough so he could dig out a spoonful.

I think about the only actual jeweler’s tool he had there was a saw frame. The rest was just salvaged: whatever tools he’d picked up wherever he could. But to look at his work, you’d never guess just how primitive his shop was. The point is, your knife-making skill is what made that blade. Not the anvil. An anvil does not make the finished work; it just makes the work easier to do. You can shape metal with a dull, damaged file. It doesn’t work all that easily, although you can do it if you put the effort into it. But a clean sharp file works a lot easier and faster, and you have to correct for fewer shortcomings of the tool. It’s the same thing with rail anvils as opposed to real anvils.

I should mention too, that I made a rail anvil many years ago. It was a decent piece of steel on which you could pound little things for jewelry making. It worked fine, as well as any large piece of steel for doing small lightweight work. But I’d never have tried to forge larger pieces on it, since for that, I had better, heavier tools even then.

A: You need diamond compound. Ideally, you’d either have a proper lapidary setup with diamond polishing wheels, or something like a GRS Powerhone with its diamond grinding wheels for shaping, and a ceramic wheel with diamond compound for polishing.

Barring that, you can make a small wooden wheel for use on the flex shaft that works very well, but slower. Cut an eighth-inch long slice of a one inch wood dowel, and drill a hole in the center so you can mount it on a standard mandrel such as you’d use for rubber wheels. True it up so it spins flat and true, then, if you like, carve into one surface slightly with a bur as it spins so it’s got a slightly concave flat surface on one face. Put a tiny dab of 14 thousand grit diamond paste compound on that surface, and polish away. The concave surface somewhat better fits the slightly curved bullet shape of the burnisher point, and reduces the speed at which the compound is thrown off. The wheel gets better as you use it, and needs recharging only rarely. If you want an even higher polish, make another one for fifty thousand grit compound. Initial shaping can be done with a small 600 grit diamond wheel. Crystalite makes a number of them that will mount in a flex shaft. Use them with oil or water, not dry.

An alternative that’s simpler are the German- made diamond-charged rubber wheels that are marketed for use with platinum in particular. The green medium grit ones will leave a fine scratched finish, roughly like a 1200 grit wheel, the grey grade will take that to a reasonable polish, and the pink ones take that to a high polish. The downside to these wheels are their cost, and their small size which makes it harder to get a nice smooth finish on the burnisher instead of a slightly wobbly or faceted finish. But they do work well to polish the carbide, and at high speeds, are just killer on platinum.

A: That’s pretty much normal behavior for small rolling mills, which is what virtually any hand rolling mill is. For one thing, we generally are rolling metal that is not exactly uniform in its structure and internal stresses, whether from the prior passes through the mill or defects or inclusions in the metal. But whatever the reason, the compression of the metal may not be exactly uniform from one side to the other, so the metal bends as it comes out of the mill. In particular, with newly-annealed sheet, the compressive force on the metal is greatest right at the surface, which elongates a bit more than the center. You can easily see this at the ends, where the center appears depressed compared to the edges or middle of a wire. So the surface ends up more work-hardened than the interior.

With the next pass, this results in more of the elongation and compression of the metal happening closer to the center, which is still softer. This progresses until the metal becomes uniformly compressed and work-hardened throughout its thickness. In practice, when rolling a sheet, for example, right after annealing, you’ll see it curve or get wavy as it leaves the mill, and this increases but changes a bit as you continue with further passes. But about the time the internal stresses in the metal become uniform, it pretty much straightens out again. not usually to perfectly flat, but a lot closer than it had been before. This is a good clue to tell you it’s now time to anneal again, since going further can overstress the metal and start it cracking.

When you buy commercially prepared sheet metal, it’s flat in part because the roll diameters used are a lot larger than the small rolling mills we use. And generally those rolling mills are more rigid and highly finished, so the variance in the metal is less, thus the variance in stresses in the metal also is less. And such metal usually is furnace-annealed, which also contributes to more uniform structure. But basically, the effect you’re seeing is normal. If you need it to be flat, anneal the metal once it’s the thickness you wish, then gently pound it flat with a rawhide, rubber, or plastic mallet on a good flat steel block. I like the lead-weighted dead-blow type of mallets best for this sort of thing. Wire is easily straightened this way; sheet takes more work and equipment. Anneal wire after you’ve drawn it to size. Put one end in a vise, grab the other end with pliers or draw tongs, and pull enough so you feel the wire slightly “give”, stretching ever so little. That’s all it takes. Your wire will now be dead straight.

A: Scotch stones are a natural abrasive stone, a type of slate, I think, from an area in Scotland (hence the name). They’re also called “Water of Ayr” stones, and the main use of the material is for making blocks used for sharpening knives and tools. Small shaped pieces of Scotch stone are also held in the hand, as with the types of various pencil stones and slips commonly used by tool and die makers, and are used to smooth metal areas and surfaces by rubbing. They have a number of advantages over powered abrasives, in that, when used with water, they wear down somewhat rapidly, so the point in use conforms to the surface of the metal being treated, thus being much less likely to leave swirls and drag lines such as one might get if trying to get into details with a rotary tool. As an abrasive, these things, while rigid and somewhat brittle, are fairly soft and gentle to the metal, wearing away, as I noted, fairly quickly in use.

That doesn’t mean their action is particularly slow, however. You can smooth tool marks and irregularities (such as solder scars, file marks, etc) on a surface remarkably fast with them, and with practice, get a surface that’s almost ready for a bit of rouge, as the stones have a very fine grain, and leave a surface finish that I’d compare to about what a 400 to 600 grit emery paper will leave. They are especially useful for getting into things like square corners, or corners and seams, recesses, or other blind or hard to reach surfaces in general, where the linear motion they facilitate conforms to the surfaces better than a rotary point might do.

They generally are available in a “stick” shape, usually four to six inches long, in shapes ranging from 1/8 inch square on up. The largest ones I’ve got are 1/2 inch square, but I’m pretty sure they can be had larger than that. I’ve used them to good effect in finishing virtually all of the jewelry metals, including silver, gold, and platinum. I don’t think I ever tried them on titanium, but I’d assume they’d have some use there, too, though perhaps they’d work slower.

A:

The reason these graphite mandrels can be hard to use is that graphite is an exceptionally good conductor of heat, so the graphite drains the heat away from the metal almost as fast as, say, an aluminum or silver mandrel would do. That makes getting rings, especially silver ones, hot enough to solder on one of these quite difficult.

But there’s another option. In addition to these graphite mandrels, you can get the same type of tool – a tapered heat-resistant mandrel mounted on a holder for soldering – made of a ceramic material that’s not a good heat conductor. These make it much easier to get the ring hot enough to solder.

The graphite ones do have their uses, though. Sometimes you actually want to keep most of the ring cool. With my graphite one, I modified it with a flat surface filed onto the top, much as some grooved mandrels are made in steel, though with mine it’s just a flat facet. That section of ring over the flat is not in contact with the graphite, and it’s possible to heat it up for soldering, while the sections in good contact with the mandrel are kept cooler. With silver, of course, the heat-sinking capability of the mandrel is little bothered by the flat, since the silver so easily moves the heat past the gap anyway. But with gold, it can be pretty useful.

A: While the cutters sold to jewelers as sprue cutters are indeed nice tools, they don’t compare to an actual bolt cutter. Industrial bolt cutters are generally substantially larger, and always have a compound action, so that a large movement of the handles translates to a small movement of the jaws. That results in enormous mechanical advantage, meaning that, unlike the commercially sold jewelers’ sprue cutters, a properly sized bolt cutter does not need much effort from you in order to cut. Keep in mind that they’re intended to cut steel bolts, and a cutter that can slice through a 1/4 inch or larger steel bolt will handle a bronze sprue like child’s play. Beyond resting one handle on your stump or bench, you can also mount it permanently, strapped to a sturdy bench by one handle. That makes it truly a one-hand tool.

The main downside to bolt cutters as opposed to specialized sprue cutters is that bolt cutters are designed with jaws sturdy enough do to their job, which means they’re fairly thick and blunt. So you cannot cut quite as close to your casting as you might with an actual sprue cutter. But since you’re casting bronze, not gold, the slight extra waste shouldn’t be an issue. Also, I’d suggest that rather than getting them from the cheapest possible source, you get the Craftsman brand from Sears. Unlike their power tools, many of their hand tools still carry the traditional Craftsman lifetime warranty, so if that applies as well to their bolt cutters (I don’t know for sure, but believe it would) if you ever break the jaws, they’d simply replace them. And, the quality of their tools, even the ones made these days in China, are better than what you’re likely to find at Harbor Freight or other discount tool importers. If you’re unsure, take one of your bronze sprues and go into Sears and try them out, perhaps with a sales person’s assistance, and you’ll see what I mean about how little force these things require for even heavy-duty cutting, if you get one sized correctly for your sprues.

I’m pretty sure the potential cost savings would make that little shopping trip worthwhile over buying a powered cutter. Note too, that power cutters are also not immune to chipping and breaking cutter jaws, and some of them get pricey to replace. If you do large volumes of such castings, then perhaps the faster power cutters would justify that cost, but at least check out the big bolt cutters first. With the right one, you will not be hurting your hand at all.

A:

You should be able to do that much more quickly. Start by casting a rod-shaped ingot, if you didn’t already. If you need the means, take two pieces of mild steel which cah be aligned repeatedly in position, and drill a hole, perhaps 1/4 inch diameter, right down the plane where the two pieces meet, not going all the way through. The contact surfaces do not have to be perfect, in fact, some slop is good since it lets air escape. File or otherwise cut a chamfered top edge to a funnel shape so you can pour molten metal into it. In this fashion, with a bit of care, you can make a good wire ingot mold. Starting with a rod-shaped ingot, you should be able to reduce it to the desired size wire in a few minutes, including pouring the ingot. Assuming you’ve got a torch that will do it okay, the whole process shouldn’t take more than about ten minutes, not ninety.

With fine silver, you simply do not have to anneal very often. You can reduce the cross-sectional area by as much as 90 percent before needing to anneal, and this metal is so soft you’re not putting any strain on the mill by doing this. Annealing less frequently also will give you a stronger, finer, grain structure when you do finally anneal the wire. And you need not be too delicate in how much reduction you take with each pass. The initial passes with the round ingot can be gentler, but once it’s squared up and the rolls are fully closed on that first groove, from there on, you can reduce the wire the full amount for each successive groove in no more than 2 or 3 passes, and often, only one pass, depending on the type of metal.

Each pass through the grooves is followed by another, with the rolls at the same setting, but with the wire rotated 90 degrees. If the grooves in the rolls are very accurately made, you can actually rotate the wire and go to the next groove, rather than repeating the same size, but with many rolls, doing this will create a slight flange, so if that happens, two passes through each groove will solve that. For short pieces of wire, what I like to do is run the wire through, catching it on the other side with my free hand, and still on that side, rotating the wire and cranking the wire back through the rolls in reverse. It’s quicker than moving back around to the front of the mill and finding the same groove again.

One basic trick is that you can roll a wire part way in, then back it out, creating a step. Rotate the wire, and roll in again to that step, then back out. Now go to the next groove or tighten the rolls, and repeat, but not going quite as far. Repeated several times, you end up with a wire that’s tapered, starting large, and reducing in steps to smaller. You can then forge the steps out with a hammer or file them out, to create a smoothly tapered wire, without having to remove most of the wire with a file to get there. You can then also do things like use the flat rolls to roll that taper flat, either going the long way, or across or diagonally, to produce a flat piece tapered in width, again without having to generate a bunch of scrap. You can also set up the mill so that one grooved roller is opposed to a flat one and roll half-round wire. Start with a square wire already rolled though, to the width you wish, then reduce to half round/half square after that. With only one grooved roll, you cannot rotate the wire to reduce its thickness in both directions, so you have to start with the desired width, no more.

And you can use it for roller printing, putting sheet silver through with some lace or even cut paper to make impressions in it, as long as you don’t try to print pieces that are too wide or need too deep a texture. Paper in particular is a shallow texture, not needing a deep bite to work. Be sure to protect the rolls from the texturing material with another sheet of metal. If you do it right, you can end up with two pieces of textured material from a single pass through the rolls. Your mill is likely too light for serious roll printing in harder metals, but fully annealed fine silver is just so soft that even these mills will be fine so long as you don’t need too deep a bite to get the full depth of a texture. So some things may not work, but don’t be afraid to try them anyway. As long as you’re not usiing excessive force on the crank handle, you’re okay. You may get more things to work than you’d expect. And if you got the mill with extra rollers with patterns in them, play with them too. Just be sure that you never have the rolls tightened down tight on each other without actually rolling metal in between, as the textured roller could leave a mark on the plain roller. With wire, and fine silver, you’d have a hard time overstressing the rolls on these small mills. Where you need to be more careful, and where you’ll run into its limits, is working with sheet metal, especially wider pieces.

A: No, but if you use a Hoke torch, for under 20 bucks, I think, you can buy a small adapter which screws onto the torch instead of a tip. It comes with six all-stainless steel hypodermic needles, with the tips cut straight across, not sharpened at a diagonal. The adapter simply allows the torch to fit any hypodermic type Lauer Lok needle, which is what the included tips are. Similar tips are also used with many of the water torches.

The trick of soldering in a length of small diameter tube to an existing Meco or Hoke torch tip is another way of achieving the same thing that I’ve seen done, not in any books, but on perhaps the majority of jewelry repair benches, especially those driven by people who’ve been around for a few years or decades, and even more especially by those folks who do a lot of chain repair and similar tiny stuff. Most were simple brass tubes, which is easier to solder to the brass torch tips than is stainless. A few bright fellows used bits of more precious tubing, if that was what they had around.

A: Unless I’m very much mistaking your description, it seems to me you could very quickly and easily modify one of our ordinary bezel pushers to be what you want. Or just make the tool from scratch. I’ll bet it wouldn’t take you very long at all, and would save you all that desperation. Steel tools are very easy to reshape and re-polish with abrasives like sanding sticks, disks in the flex shaft, various rubberized abrasive wheels, etc. Polish up with the same materials you’d use for gold or silver. If the steel needs to be actually bent, then you’ll need to soften it and re-harden it as desired, but that’s not hard to do either.

For the various styles of plastic ones, just get some scrap Delrin (acetal), and start sawing and carving.

In fact, thinking about it, I don’t think I have a single setting tool on my bench that hasn’t been modified from its original condition in some way. Some modifications are as simple as cleaning up the shape and polishing better (the usual curved burnishers are sometimes a bit sloppy in finish right at the all important tip, for example). Others started just with a standard piece of tool steel or carbide and got turned into something I can use. Remember that craftspeople are not just tool users. We’ve got a long tradition of tool making too. Some tools, like files or rotary burs, are probably best left in the manufacturers’ original forms, at least as for cutting the teeth. But I’ve got many files (not to mention pliers, especially, and all those various burnishers and pushers and various other simple tools) that have been trimmed or otherwise modified. Don’t be shy about making a tool or changing one. It’s all part of the job.

A:

I’ve noticed that after some use, the fixtures that hold your parts on one of those welders get a layer of oxide and grunge on their lower surface that reduces the contact between the fixture and the piece. When that happens, the resistance between it and the piece is equal to or greater than to the contacting welding nib, so you then get a welding arc between the piece and the fixture, rather than entirely between it and the finding.

The solution is to remove the fixture, and file or sand the surface back to bright, clean and smooth. That should help. Sometimes, a little bit of saliva on the piece will help too; the moisture seems to improve the contact between the fixture and the work. Then when the weld takes place, the moisture in the weld area reduces the cleanup of smoke stain that’s required. It varies a lot from metal to metal, but give it a try.

Generally, the main things I’ve had trouble with, with the Sparkies, is in welding sterling findings to sterling silver parts. Sterling-to- sterling welds have a tendency to come out somewhat brittle, and it sometimes takes a couple of tries to get a secure weld.

A: Your problem is trying to produce a bezel from a solid flat disk. That will tear just about every time, and it’s not how it’s done. Instead of thinking of bezel blocks as tools that do the whole job of making a bezel or the preform for making a crown head, think of them as forming dies whose main role is to take a preshaped bit of metal and refine that shape into a perfectly uniform one. You just have to start with something closer to the end result than a flat disk. Try starting with a “washer” shape, a disk with a clean, centered, smooth hole in the middle such that the remaining rim is as wide as you wish your bezel to be tall. Making a bezel this way tends to produce one with a thicker upper edge and a thinner base, which is not always what you might wish, but if it is, that’s how to get there. Punching this then drives the center down and stretches it to become the lower edge of the bezel. This is most useful for round bezels, where simple circle or hole punches can quickly make a washer shape, but you can do this with other shapes too. It works best if you don’t need a bezel with much height.

Or, alternatively (and this is how I most frequently use these), make a straight-sided cylindrical bezel, a short, thick walled tube that drops down a bit into the desired hole. Use the punch to flare it to a clean tapered shape. You can even start with a tube shape as wide as your desired bezel will be on top, but then, instead of using the punch to flare it, you can press it down into the appropriate hole. This compresses the base of the bezel, thickening it, while leaving the top edge the same thickness. You get it close to how you want it this way, then clean it up with the punch. You can press it down into the hole with an actual press, with a vise if you hold the whole thing vertically, or with a hammer, using a flat block on top of the bezel to keep things level, then hammering the block down. I most commonly use a small arbor press for this, myself.

Pressing the bezel into the hole compresses the lower edge, slightly thickening it, as it forces the bezel into the tapered opening. The punch is then used to finish it up, forcing the whole thing cleanly into the block. If, when you’re done punching it into the block, the upper edge is not even, you can either file protruding parts back down to the block surface, or put the bezel into the next smaller opening, and use the surface of the block as a reference surface to mark a level line around the bezel to which you file the edge down. That keeps the upper edge true to the taper of the bezel. The lower edge can then be scribed referencing that upper edge, to refine it too if needed. One unique aspect to this method is the way in which it takes the uniform-thickness metal that you started with, and gives you a bezel that’s thicker at the bottom. While this is not always useful, if you’re doing something like sawing and filing that bezel, usually a round or oval one, into the classic “crown” prong setting, then you end up with prongs that are thicker and stronger at the base than at the tips. That can be a quite good thing, as it makes prongs harder to accidentally bend back away from a stone after setting.

To make a coronet setting, which is basically a truncated cone that’s attached by its small end and pierced on the big end to form prongs, cut a piece of flat sheet the thickness you wish for the tips of the prongs. Make sure this is thick enough – if it’s too thin, you’ll have problems. It will get thicker towards the base, which is good for the strength of the prongs. Figure out what length of stock you’d need were you making a straight sided bezel for your stone, then cut a piece that will make either a straight cylindrical bezel shape, or lay it out along an arc that will make a cone shape when joined. Either way, the top edge will form a circle either the right size for your coronet, or slightly larger. Fit and solder the joint very tightly, so you won’t see a solder seam. Use the hardest grade of solder you can control, or better yet, fuse the seam if you’re using a metal where this works well.

Now round it out if it wasn’t already round. It doesn’t need to be exact. Then, starting with a bezel block hole large enough so your shape only sticks up a bit above the top, force it down in with a press of some sort. If you’re careful, you can use a steel block placed on top so the pressure surface is level to the top of the block, and hammer it down, although I much prefer using a press. The result will still mostly be your original cylinder, but the bottom edge will have started to compress to a cone shape. Move on to the next smaller size hole, until you’ve reached one where the cone fully fills the upper circumference of the hole. At each hole, the amount of the piece that has assumed a cone shape to conform with the bezel block will increase. When you’ve gotten to the point where the hole you’re using is the same or slightly smaller than the original size of your blank, you then can true up the whole thing with the punch.

If the blank was slightly larger than the hole you’ve used, the excess metal will have flattened horizontally to a bit of a rim. Rather than this flange being a problem, it’s put to use, because you left yourself some extra height in the blank. Now you can use that rim as a ready-made layout line and file the top of your cone shape right to the corner of that rim, which is now the top edge and perfectly true to the cone shape. Even if your original blank was exactly the right size to fit your final hole in the bezel block so there’s no flange, the top edge is likely to need a little truing up with a file. Just be sure to keep it level. The block will help you see this. Use dividers to mark the desired distance from that top edge down to the bottom edge. No doubt the bottom edge, which has compressed and thickened, will be a little bit off level – maybe quite a bit. But you can use this scribed line to file that bottom edge true to the top. Now you’ve got a perfect truncated cone shape. For a coronet head, you now scribe a second line an appropriate distance from the bottom edge, and using that line, saw off the bottom, forming a shallow cone that will fit up against the remaining larger one for a base. Now you lay out your prongs, and saw and file them to shape. Then saw out the openings in the bottom of the prongs to match. Clean them all up, and pre-polish at least those bottom cutouts, as well as the top surface of that previously sawed-off bottom rim, which you now carefully solder back onto the top part. A bit more clean-up, and you’re done.

You can also sometimes make the initial bezel smaller, so the punch can be used to stretch the bezel into the die, but as often as not, rather than cleanly stretching the whole bezel edge, it tears it, which isn’t so useful. Bezels without much height work best with this. The main downside to using bezel blocks is that as often as not, the actual size and proportions you need is not quite what the block produces. This isn’t so much a problem with round punches or those with even proportions like squares or triangles, but for ovals or rectangles, where you may wish a different length-to-width ratio, the bezel blocks may be not so useful.

In short, there are a number of ways to use these tools. They are not so much great time-savers as they are a means to get the bezels really straight, with uniform angles and proportions. You can start with a fabricated bezel on which you didn’t spend much time, so it’s not quite straight or perfect in proportions, for example, and the bezel block and punch will even it up for you. You can also, if you wish, use them to help true up a wire setting, but there are problems doing so, because with a wire setting, the upper and lower gallery wires need to remain flat and evenly spaced. If you use a bezel block on an entire setting which is out of true, as the metal moves to fit the block, both the flatness of the galleries and the spacing between them, not to mention the details of the prong wires, can all be thrown out of whack. The blocks ARE useful for truing up single wires, like the gallery wires before they’re assembled, but for that, the block is overkill, as you can do it just about as quickly at the bench. Heavy round rings, though, can be trued up and closed at the same time by driving them into a block, but again, this isn’t an essential role for the blocks. The blocks can true up a cone shape (or equivalent versions in non round shapes), as well as helping to true up their top and bottom edges. I find they work best as compression dies, forcing a pre-made shape down into the block rather than trying to stretch one into the block with the punch. Overly thin metal may not work so well, as it buckles rather than compressing. And be sure the metal is well-annealed first.

A: The “boiling out” process, and the “boil-out pot” you’re talking about probably refers not to a pickling solution, but to an alkaline cleaning one. Some of us still use it, either in place of, or next to and as an alternative to, ultrasonic cleaners. In our shop, we use a boil-out pot with a simmering solution of TSP as a means of cleaning the gunk out of rings, behind stones, etc. before working on them, or as a means of cleaning polishing compound off after polishing. This would be for those times when the ultrasonic cleaner is not appropriate, such as if there is risk of losing loose stones, or with metals or stones which the ultrasonic can damage.

The boil-out takes longer, but is quite effective, and much gentler to the jewelry. It won’t shake out stones that aren’t securely set, and won’t frost the finish on cast sterling silver, the way stronger ultrasonics can do if the silver is left in there a bit too long in an attempt to remove stubborn deposits of polishing compound.

I know of one commercial repair shop that simply refuses to use an ultrasonic at all. Instead, they clean their work using a boil-out pot filled with a solution of lye, under a good exhaust vent. They’ve got another one with much gentler TSP, I think, or perhaps some other detergent, for things that cannot tolerate lye. The reason they went to this setup is that they work with a lot of silver, and got tired of having to repolish silver things that had gotten marred by the ultrasonic they’d had before.

A: If it makes you feel any better, laser welders too, have their limits, especially those, like the older machines or some of the less costly ones available now, that don’t offer pulse-shaping abilities. Laser welds are inherently work-hardened, and perhaps for the same reason you can get brittleness in a PUK weld. Here you’ve just generated a little molten pool of metal in what amounts to a larger, rigid, mass of cold metal. The molten metal solidifies quickly and then cools equally quickly. As it cools, it shrinks. Unlike a cooling solder joint where everything got hot, in this instance, the weld alone is cooling, so it has to stretch. Some metals just get a bit harder, others crack. Pulse-shaping allows the weld to be cooled a bit slower, allowing just a little bit of annealing to happen as it cools, thus avoiding some of the cracking problems. But lasers can blast stones, give crack-prone brittle welds, and otherwise fail to always live up to the promises of sales people who may not themselves be expert laser welder operators.

With that said, lasers seem to have fewer of these problems than do the PUK welders, perhaps just because you’ve got a few more parameters to adjust and alter. Retipped prongs don’t crack off, for example, in most cases I’ve seen. But they will be harder than a torch-retipped prong, which may be a good thing for its wearing properties. On the other hand, a laser-repaired whole prong in white gold which needs to bend at the weld for setting a stone will often be crack-prone. Platinum though, is a dream to weld with the laser. And if your laser has the power, the usual 18K yellow golds work very nicely too. I have more trouble with 14K yellow, which tends to crack. So do many of the nickel white golds, especially when you’re working on a casting.

I often use my laser not for the whole assembly, but as a way to attach and align and hold parts for subsequent soldering. Among other things, I can construct a tight capillary seam, tack it with the laser, then flow solder in, so that the seam is virtually invisible, as a good solder seam should be. Laser welds, and PUK welds, just don’t do that, since the weld bead has width, and the deeper the weld, the wider the weld zone ends up being. If you can clean up the weld, it can be an invisible seam. But for detailed precisely-fitted parts, sometimes it’s messier than solder.

A: WD-40 is often misunderstood. People use it as a lubricant and penetrating oil, and assume it’s the same thing as oil. While it does lubricate fine mechanisms temporarily, and frees them up if something’s stuck, its real purpose, suggested by the initials “WD”, is water displacement. For the most part, it’s kerosene, I think, and it does not actually contain much in the way of oil, or anything that would provide a persistent lasting film on the iron. So after you sprayed your mold, heating it pretty much removed all the WD-40. That’s why the metal then stuck.

You can remove the metal by just prying and scraping it off. WD-40 might even help in this. But when you pour ingots, try preparing the mold with an actual oil. Motor oil, even used motor oil, works fine. So do other oils, such as peanut oil, etc. Heat the mold till the oil smokes—a good bit hotter than the temperature at which WD-40 will appear to burn and smoke, since it’s much more volatile. The other common pretreatment for a mold is to coat it with soot. You can get that with most torch flames by turning off all the air or oxygen, so the flame is very yellow. The metal is held just beyond the visible yellow flame, so that soot is deposited in the cavity. I usually do this to a brand-new mold, then add some oil to the result, and heat it until it starts to really smoke quite a bit. This leaves a sort of cured surface similar to a well broken-in iron wok.

Once initially cured like this, the mold will only need a little more oil applied every few ingots. Machined molds, with smoother surfaces, take a lot less preparation than rougher cast iron molds, which initially need a lot of soot and oil to clog up the rough pores enough so the metal can easily separate from it.

A: First of all, the length of the graver will depend on the style of handle you prefer, as well as your hand size. It’s not “one size fits all”. So gravers are sold long, to be shortened to the personal tastes of the user and the use to which it will be put. You do not need to reshape them unless you wish, for example, to curve them. Often they are used straight, just as sold. Most engravers will want to remove some of the back of the graver so there’s a smaller point to sharpen, but again, this depends on the actual use, (stone setting may need a differently shaped graver than formal engraving, for example) and the preference of the user. If you are not bending them (which you can do), then they do not need additional heat treatment, assuming you don’t “burn” them in sharpening. And sharpening too, is not done the same for every purpose. It depends on your tastes and skill, the type of metal, the type of engraving, etc.

There are some graver sets that are sold presumably ready to use, or almost so. The EFB gravers, for example, pretty much need only final sharpening. That works because the length of those gravers is adjustable by how they’re placed in their handles. Some users, though, may need to shorten the backs of those, to start out a bit shorter than as-sold. And there is a small set of gravers sold for stone setting that’s advertised as “ready to use”. I don’t happen to like how they’re prepared in that kit, though.

If you want to be sure not to need to heat-treat (though most carbon steel quality gravers are already pretty good as-sold), you can get the high speed steel ones. Those, you can’t heat-treat. They come ready to use, hardness-wise. They keep an edge a bit longer, but some users feel they don’t take quite as sharp an edge. Again: personal tastes…For beginners, most carbon steel gravers, if treated right, are usable with the existing heat treatment. With experience, you may wish to alter that condition, but again, this isn’t something the manufacturer would do, since generally it would mean leaving the cutting edge slightly harder than the body of the graver, and that depends on it being adjusted to the right length first. Another alternative is to buy carbide gravers. Usually only sold as square blanks, they need grinding and sharpening, but no heat treatment. They’re fairly specialized tools, though, and not suitable for all uses.

Properly preparing the gravers is the first step to any work with gravers, from stone setting to engraving, and it’s an important one. Improperly prepared and sharpened gravers will be almost impossible to get decent work from, and can actually be dangerous in use.

First, mount the graver securely on its handle. The style of graver handle is a matter of choice, based on the size of your hand, how you like it to feel, etc. One way to mount a graver is to hold it in a vise, the tang pointing up. Pre-drill an undersized hole in the graver handle if it doesn’t already have one. Heat the back end of the tang with a torch to bright red hot, then quickly drive the handle down onto the tang with a mallet. Allow it to cool, quench if you like. The graver will burn its way into the wood creating a perfectly fitted socket in the wood, which tightens down on the tang as the wood and the tang cool down again.

Then size the graver. Again, this is a bit of a matter of preference, but in general, hold the graver in your hand as though using it, the handle in its appropriate place in your palm, and with your thumb extended as far down the graver as you comfortably can. Mark that length, or maybe a slight bit more. That, for many people, is about the right length to start with. In use, the graver will get shorter over time, and that will be OK, but much longer than this is usually harder to control, so you start by shortening it to that point.

Shorten the graver by putting it, again, in a good sturdy vise or hand clamp, held by the vise jaws on the “good” part of the graver, the part you want to keep, with the excess waste section protruding up above the vise jaws. Wear safety glasses. Hit the extended end of the graver with a hammer. It will snap right off and go flying away. You can hold a cloth towel behind that waste part when you hit it to catch that section if you like.

Now comes the work—sharpening the thing. For most gravers, the first part is grinding off the back of the graver using a bench grinder or whatever you’ve got, so it tapers from the handle to the point. Depending on the shape and type of graver, the thickness can be tapered anywhere from about half the original thickness at the tip, to as little as a millimeter in thickness, leaving just a delicate small tip of the graver at its end. The main point is that the working end of the graver should be no larger than needed to produce the cuts you wish, in order both to better see what you’re doing in sometimes tight quarters, but also so that you don’t have to grind off so much while sharpening and resharpening. Try to keep it cool when you’re grinding on it, so you don’t lose the temper. After the back is cut down to your desired taper towards the point, you then sharpen the graver.

But that skill takes more than a quick message to describe. I’d suggest getting a good book on engraving that shows the proper angles and geometries for a proper point. There’s lots of good info on Steve Lindsay’s website on sharpening, as well as tons of other aspects of hand engraving. Plus lots of examples you’ll drool over…and engraving discussion forums there where you can ask a bunch of engraving experts and enthusiasts . Steve, of course, is the inventor and builder of the Lindsay air graver line of power engraving handpieces. These things make hand engraving a lot faster and easier both to learn, and to do. This type of tool will cut your learning time way way down. The same is true of the popular GRS brand of power engraving handpieces. Personally, I prefer Steve’s tools. Built by Steve, they work and look like a fine Swiss watch or piece of jewelry as much as a fine tool. I prefer the operation, look, and feel of the Lindsay handpieces to the GRS tools, but it should also be said that the GRS tools are fine quality as well, and cost a bit less, I think.

Usual disclaimers re: Steve Lindsay’s site and tools. I’ve no personal stake in either. I’m just a highly satisfied customer, and, as you’ll be when you see his site and work, totally blown away by what he does with these tools.

A: How about bolting it to a piece of plywood, large enough so there’s room to hold that board down to the floor with sandbags. Or use a bit more plywood to make a low flat box onto which the lap can be bolted. Before covering over the top, fill it with concrete. You don’t need to bolt it to the floor, in order to have it bolted to a hundred pounds of concrete. Loose rock filling the box would probably do it too.

I’m reminded of the trick some people have used to secure their centrifugal casting machines. The one where you scrounged up a 55-gallon oil drum, put casters on the bottom so it could still roll around, filled it half way with concrete so it weighed a whole lot, then capped the concrete at the halfway level with plywood or something to which you can bolt the machine so that it’s secured, while the upper part of the drum gives you a shield for the machine. Even when the arm isn’t balanced all that properly, done right this can still be totally rock solid. Sheer mass holds it in place. For the lap you don’t need the shield, and could have it lower down, but the basic idea is the same.

A: At auto supply shops, Sears, or similar places that sell various tools, you can find “drift punches”. These things amount to various sizes of tapered steel rods. Not only do they make inexpensive bezel mandrels, but if you’ve got a good-sized torch—a welding torch or larger soldering torch, not your micro-sized jewelry torch you can make your own sinusoidal stake fairly easily from one of these. Simply heat it at appropriate intervals, bending it, then moving over a bit, bending it again in the other direction, etc, until you’ve got your desired stake shape. Then get to work sanding/finishing off the oxidation from bending, and you’ve got it. It’s not hard to do, but takes some time and equipment, which is why the commercially—made ones cost some money.

For the various styles of plastic ones, just get some scrap Delrin (acetal), and start sawing and carving.

A: Tool steel is not some extra fancy stuff. It’s just a good grade of high carbon steel that can be fully hardened, and I’d guess this is what you want. It’s the same material that things like files, chasing tools, various punches and other tools you already may have are made of. If it’s hard to start with, you can just use abrasive tools to shape it, being careful not to get it too hot in the process. If it’s soft, then shape it first, then heat it to red heat, then quench it in water or oil, depending on the type of steel it is, to harden it. Then heat it to temper it, reducing the hardness of the steel so it isn’t brittle. Sand a part of it near the working edge, and watch the colors flow over the surface as you heat it. For this use, probably a “peacock” color, a blue-purple, is what you want to see. Quench it when that color appears, and it’s tempered.

If you don’t really wish to make your own, or perhaps want a tool that can crank this out faster than your hammered-together plates can (it’s a somewhat iffy method for achieving consistent results), you might want to look at a pattern rolling mill. The little cheap mills made in India or Spain and which are often sold for under 300 dollars have available a number of optional pattern rolls that include a range of interesting embossed wires, some of which, if I recall, are classic beaded wire patterns. I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that the Karat Brand carries these.

This approach would cost you more, of course, than banging out your own tools, but you’d likely save almost as much back again, in terms of the time and trouble saved, plus the rolling mill makes more than just the one pattern of wire.

A: A magnetic stirrer uses a single magnet rotating under the center of the stirrer’s top plate. It’s oriented with side-to-side poles, and the stir rod is also a magnet with end-to-end poles, so it will want to stay oriented with the magnet in the stirrer. As the stirrer’s magnet is rotated around its center (think of the arrow on a compass, made to spin) the stirring bar follows suit. They are not necessarily very strong magnets, but since there is a pair of them interacting, they get the job done.

The magnetic tumbler on the other hand, spins a disk to which are mounted, along the periphery, two or more very strong magnets. These are capable of dragging along the stainless steel pins in the bowl above. The magnets need to be much stronger, since the pins themselves are not magnetized, and there’s a fair mass of metal (the pins, plus pieces) to be moved along. The magnets used are usually disks, often ¾ to an inch in diameter, with the magnetic poles on the flat faces, so the lines of force radiate up from the magnet in a way that causes the pins to also stand on end as the magnet passes under. At least, that’s how they’re set up on the tumber I have, a Swest “mini”, which isn’t so small. I don’t know who actually built it. It works well though.

My personal choice for your situation would be to go with air—acetylene, however, You can get either the somewhat larger B size tanks, which will last for a very long time, or the smaller R (I think that’s it) sized tanks, and hook this up to a Smiths Handi Heat, a Prestolite, or some similar air-acetylene torch, and you’ll have few limits on what you can do. With larger tips, these can melt significant amounts of silver, and with smaller ones, do fine wire soldering. While acetylene means storing another tank, like propane, it’s a low pressure tank without the high pressure dangers of an oxygen tank, and in case of a leak, it dissipates very rapidly, unlike the much more dangerous (in my opinion, at least) propane, which is heavier than air and tends to pool in low areas indoors.

A: The butane mini torches will do small modest jobs in silver, but are only barely hot enough in my experience. Some are better than others. The Ronson Multiflame (I think that was the name) that I had years ago was considerably larger in flame size than, say, the smaller “Blazer” style ones one sees today, and I’ve seen even smaller “pencil” styles ones that are likely good for lighting a cigar or a fire in the fireplace, but won’t solder much more than small wire-work joints. so it depends on just what butane torch you’ve got, and what you’re trying to do. The fuel itself burns a bit cooler than does propane, but more important is how much of it the torch is burning at any one time. Many of the current crop of small hand-held butane torches are just a bit too small to be really useful.

But propane and air does work just fine, though not with the pinpoint control you may be used to with propane and oxygen. Any local hardware store will happily sell you a propane plumbers’ torch that uses disposable small tanks. These are relatively safe to use and store, and are hot enough for decent jewelry-scale soldering, though again without quite the pinpoint control you may be used to. For silver, though, with its high heat conductivity requiring you to heat a wider area anyway, they can do just fine, once you get used to them. A refinement of this type of torch adds a hose between the torch handle and the tank, and this may be the better type for you, since the flame won’t change from tilting the torch.

My personal choice for your situation would be to go with air—acetylene, however, You can get either the somewhat larger B size tanks, which will last for a very long time, or the smaller R (I think that’s it) sized tanks, and hook this up to a Smiths Handi Heat, a Prestolite, or some similar air-acetylene torch, and you’ll have few limits on what you can do. With larger tips, these can melt significant amounts ot silver, and with smaller ones, do fine wire soldering. While acetylene means storing another tank, like propane, it’s a low pressure tank without the high pressure dangers of an oxygen tank, and in case of a leak, it dissipates very rapidly, unlike the much more dangerous (in my opinion, at least) propane, which is heavier than air and tends to pool in low areas indoors.

Another choice worth considering is a Little Torch. While normally these get used with larger tanks, you can get this with adapters and regulators that fit the small disposable propane tanks, as well as similar-sized disposable oxygen tanks. These small tanks are pretty safe, simply because the small amount of total gas they contain. They’re more costly because buying gas in those small disposable canisters is hardly economical, but it does give you a very small, relatively safe package with which you can do occasional soldering, and if you’ve a preference for a very small precise torch, the Little Torch of course is an obvious preference. At one time I was doing art fairs and the like and desired some means of sizing rings on the spot for customers. That setup worked just fine for me then without needing a lot of space in the car to transport it.

A: This takes a little practice. But open the acetylene valve just enough to light, and then also barely crack open the oxygen valve. Done right, it lights to a flame with enough oxygen already there so it’s not sooty. Done wrong, you get a nice loud bang. The trick is just to use a tiny bit of oxygen. Just open the oxygen valve enough so it’s no longer closed tightly. Then, if it’s still too yellow and sooty, the valve will at least be quick to open further.

The other method is to have the acetylene valve open enough so it’s a pretty fast flame that ignites, even if it’s only acetylene. On some torch-tip combinations, that results in a yellow flame, but one which drags in enough air along its way so you don’t get much soot. This doesn’t always work with all torches, though. Light the fuel gas, adjust for a suitably-sized starting flame, then add oxygen or air to get a good usable flame. Then adjust the size or intensity as needed with either or both fuel and oxygen. By the way, if when turning on the oxygen, you then can’t light it until you add more fuel gas, then it’s a crap-shoot as to whether you’ve got a usable mix that you can ignite. Too much oxygen, and it won’t light, or will try to light but just “pops” and goes out again. If you use more than enough acetylene, that’s a variant of your “fuel first” method.

In short, do it wrong, and it basically just won’t light, or won’t light as easily. But don’t worry—nothing you’ll do in lighting the torch will actually blow up or damage the torch. However, when turning it off, if you turn off the fuel first, then the flame gets sharper and sharper until it goes out, but in going out (especially with larger torchs and torch tips), you can get a loud “bang” noise. This is indeed a tiny explosion, but other than startling you, will do no great harm, unless jumping when being startled causes something unfortunate to happen. Do this in a workshop with other people, and you can annoy them. But you will not have damaged the torch. I’m not sure if the microflame torch will even produce a large enough flame to get a noticably annoying pop when extinguished this way. Welding torches, and metal melting torches, larger soldering torches, yes. Tiny ones, Little Torches, etc., not so much.

Try to avoid any wind, including fans blowing across your soldering area. Many jewelers’ torches get really hard to light in any sort of breeze. If you’ve got the garage door open for ventilation, close it enough so there’s no actual breeze in your work area. That will help a lot. Barring that, you’ll do best to set up some sort of wind screen so you’re at least lighting the torch in mostly still air.

When new, the torch valves can be pretty stiff at first. But you might also try very slightly loosening the larger hex nuts at the base of each valve. I don’t recall if this is the case on the Little torch, but on many, that nut, actually part of the valve body where it screws into the torch handle, is also part of the packing/sealing system to keep the valve stem from allowing a gas or oxygen leak. If that’s the case, slightly unscrewing that from the torch body will ease the tightness with which the valve turns. Don’t overdo it, or you’ll get the leak the packing is intended to prevent. If it doesn’t help, then I’ve remembered the torch construction wrong, so tighten it up again. Either way, it will loosen up after you’ve used it a bit.

It also sounds as though you might have the tank output pressures set too high. The Little Torch uses gas and oxygen pressures a good deal lower than most other torches. Try unscrewing the regulator handles a bit to get lower pressures. That should help a lot with the torch flame blowing out. If you’ve got the usual standard little torch kit, they usually supply it with the same set of tips no matter what fuel gas you’ll be using. With propane or natural gas, the first three tip sizes, #1, #2, and #3 are pretty useless. You can, with low regulator settings, get the #3 to light but it’s good for only the tiniest of soldering jobs. The #1 and #2 are almost impossible to light at all with any flame stability, though sometimes you can get a faint tiny flame useful for polishing details on wax models. But that’s about it. In general, for actual work on metals, you’ll be using the #4 and larger tips with propane and oxygen.

A: It’s true, perhaps, that not every jeweler has tried platinum work, and many younger workers haven’t yet learned it. It doesn’t require an absolute specialist either, just a well-trained reasonably experienced all-around jeweler capable of precise work. Contrary to some common myths, it’s not actually all that hard to do, once you’ve learned how—it just needs practice. While I’d agree that platinum melts pretty hot, the only really specialized equipment you need to work with it as a jeweler is an appropriate pair of dark glasses, and an appropriate soldering/melting block to work on. (Some experience and knowledge and practice helps a lot, though). After a while, you’ll accumulate some other specialized tools. Most of ‘em you’ll have made yourself, and often out of nicely polished carbide. It’s different to work with than gold or silver, and follows somewhat different rules which you must follow. But with practice, you’ll learn to love it. It’s not so forgiving of mistakes, but it will also let you do things you could never do in gold or silver. What is difficult to get good at with platinum is casting the stuff. Getting good castings consistently can be a real problem, even for professional casters with expensive equipment. So, send out the casting work, and get good at fabrication.

To work with platinum, the following rules and observations may be of help: As you might already know, carbon contaminates platinum easily, causing brittleness. An oxy-acetylene torch will cause problems due to its dirty flame. In melting and soldering platinum, the key point is to use a harsh oxidizing flame at all times. Oxygen and natural gas or propane are fine fuels. Oxy-hydrogen is better, but not so much so that I’d recommend you go right out and get a new setup just for platinums. With a normal Meco or Hoke torch you can easily make ingots of half an ounce or so. Flux, as well as the normal boric acid firecoat, is not required. A little flux, though, can be useful to help hold paillons of solder in place. Soldering is generally done with paillons placed on the joints, instead of the common practice in gold-work of using a poker to bring solder to the joint. Getting good at this, by the way, will improve your gold soldering joints as well, since soldering gold with a poker can often lead to overheating of the solder, with resultant pitting.

Use an ultrasonic or steam cleaner on all parts immediately before any soldering or annealing, to be sure they are clean and free of any grease or fingerprints, etc, which can be a source of carbon upon heating. The cardinal rule for working in platinum is to Keep Things Clean. You must not allow the platinum while heated to soldering or melting temperature to contact carbon, including reducing flames, charcoal blocks, or greasy dirt burning off from heating a dirty piece, or iron, both of which can contaminate the platinum. Steel tweezers can be used if kept far away from the heated area, so as never to get hot enough to cause contamination. Especial care must be taken that filings and bits of gold or silver don’t contaminate the platinum when it’s heated, or they will burn into it the same way lead will burn into heated silver or gold. Wash residues off the platinum after rolling or drawing, before you anneal it, for example.

If you are holding the piece(s) using steel tweezers, be sure that they are well away from the areas you are actually heating. If the steel gets anywhere near the platinum soldering or fusing temps, it can contaminate the platinum. It’s possible to use such tools, but you must be careful. Fortunately, platinum doesn’t transmit heat well from one section to another, so if your flame isn’t larger than needed, and is pointed away from the tweezers, you can avoid problems. Tungsten carbide makes a wonderful burnisher, which will more easily polish small details than any other tool, and won’t contaminate the platinum. A thin carbide rod makes a safe soldering poker for platinum as well. Pure tungsten is the only other metal you can make a really safe soldering poker with. Titanium won’t contaminate the platinum, but at those temps, it burns. Steel will contaminate the platinum badly. The need to keep steel away from the hot zone can make holding the workpieces difficult. Carbide-tipped tweezers, such as those available for the GRS benchmate soldering station (my own setup, as it happens—there are others as well) will prevent contamination, but are also strong heatsinks. So often, a joint must be “jigged” or otherwise planned so that it can be positioned or held together for soldering. Very often, the simple trick of leaving bits of wire long enough so you can still grab the far end with tweezers to solder the other end, instead of cutting things to length before, will do the trick. Or wires can be bent around, with one end clamped by tweezers to another part of the assembly, while the far end is soldered. (This is easier to do than to explain here.) Think of putting two prongs onto a ring, part of making a multi-prong head, for example. Instead of soldering one wire, and then the next, you fit a longer piece of wire bent into a U shape, so each arm of the U is in position to be one prong. You can clamp one intersection of one arm with the ring, thus holding the other one for soldering. After soldering both, the bottom of the U can be cut off. Get the idea? Anyway, a little preplanning as you assemble a piece will generally reveal ways of supporting and holding things while you assemble them. Platinum is a poor enough heat conductor that it is possible to space consecutive joints in a piece quite close together, without melting the previous joint, using the same grade of solder on all the joints.

Use either a Wesgo type soldering block (or one of their round melting crucibles, turned upside down, which is much cheaper than the actual blocks) or get one of Rio Grande’s platinum soldering blocks, which are much cheaper. They are in essence a high temp fine-grained fire brick, and softer than the fused silica Wesgo blocks, but work very well and for much less money. Forget the various other fused silica “high temp” soldering blocks others carry. Most of the ones I’ve tried are jokes. They seem to be too highly sintered, and transmit way too much heat. Soldering on one set on your bench pin quickly sets the pin on fire. And the idiots who designed at least one of the available blocks saw fit to glue on nice looking rubber feet to the underside. Guess what happens to those rubber feet the first time even a little heat hits the top of that block? Remember the line in Star Wars, where Luke, Chewy, Han, and the princess jump into a trash dump and the princess accuses Luke of discovering a wonderful new smell? Get the picture?

Often, as with gold work, you’ll need to make an ingot to roll out sheet metal or wire you don’t already have, or to reuse clean bits and pieces. Small ingots can be cast by melting platinum into an appropriately carved depression in the Wesgo or Rio soldering blocks. For wire, carve a groove in the bottom of a platinum crucible, or use the groove in the back edge of a standard Wesgo casting crucible. Wear a dust mask, and use a Mizzy wheel or a diamond grinding wheel to carve the depression. Don’t try to cast one with a standard ingot mold; the iron will trash the platinum. Usually, you’re only making a big enough ingot for a small section of stock anyway, so this is an easy and convenient, if less elegant-looking, way to do it. You’ll find as well that the stuff rolls out so beautifully that you can successfully convert even rather rough and ugly lumps into good quality sheet and wire, where gold or silver in those shapes would often crack up before the rolls trued up the lumps. You may find when you melt the platinum onto that depression on the block that the block is melting as well, and the platinum will seem firmly fused to the block as it cools. Not to worry. Just let it cool all the way, and by the time it’s cold, it will have sprung loose again from the silica, due to differing thermal contraction rates. Now, it can be rolled to the form you desire. If needed, you can hammer-forge it first into more of an ingot shape, but platinum will tolerate much more “abuse” in rolling odd shapes without cracking apart in the rolling process, so these “lumps”, though not as attractive as a mold-poured ingot, are entirely serviceable. If you need to make long pieces of wire, roll several of these blobs out partially, then weld them together to make longer pieces. And in drawing wire, if you’ve got a carbide drawplate, the round holes can produce a wire so perfectly polished that if you’re careful, the final polish on the piece won’t be able to improve on the original drawn finish which remains.

Get a pair of good cobalt blue glasses for melting or soldering platinum. Rio sells em for a whopping 40 bucks, but if you call the Fend-all company, 5 E. College Drive, Arlington Heights, IL 60004, at (847) 577-7400 (I think that’s it, or get the number from directory assistance), you can get the name of a local distributor of their safety glasses. Fend-all makes the glasses Rio sells, but doesn’t sell direct. The last pair I got from their distributor here charged me $28 a pair. The same company also makes a wonderful didymium-lensed safety glass. Unlike the intensely dark blue cobalt, good for very high temps, the didymium lens is only a very light blue color, and changes your working view very little. But it almost completely blocks a very narrow band in the yellow, right where the sodium line is, which means that the bright yellow flare you get when a flame hits fluxes or glass containing sodium (borax, etc.) is completely blocked. Ordinary glowing yellow from heat is still visible, but your metal isn’t obscured by the yellow coloration the flame gets from hitting sodium-containing materials. Glass workers routinely use these glasses, and I’ve found them very useful for many delicate soldering or gold and silver melting operations where a true dark glass isn’t really required. They cost more than the cobalt, like closer to $35 or $40, but are, in my opinion, very well worth the cost. Once you try them, you’ll wonder how you managed without…

Work tight. Use as little solder as needed to do the job. Platinum solder is not actually made with platinum usually, but is an alloy of palladium and silver, except for the highest melting grades. So it’s no surprise that it’s slightly grayer and softer than platinum itself. If you use too much instead of getting seams tight in the first place, you’ll see the lines and color difference after polishing. For initial seams, especially in larger chunks, like the seam in a plain band, you can simply weld the stuff, with no solder at all. Cut the seam with a side cutter or file a notch, so it’s not a seam, but a V—shaped groove, Place a chunk of extra platinum on top, and heat just that chunk. It will heat and melt before the rest, and slump in quite nicely. Just pull back before you then melt the rest of the piece. Now forge it out a bit and file to shape, and voila—a seamless joint.

For a neater seam, say in an already made engagement ring’s shank, which you’re sizing, don’t make it such a wide V, just a slightly sloppy seam. Roll out a very thin piece of platinum sheet, a little bigger than the seam, insert it, so it sticks out about a mm. in all directions. Concentrate your sharp hissing flame just on that little insert until it fuses into the rest of the shank. Practice this on scrap stock before doing it for real, to get the feel of it. You may have to fuse first one side, then the other. Just make sure that your fusion is going all the way through the seam, rather than lingering at the outer surface. The big advantage to all this is that then you have no solder seam to “pull out” in polishing, or to be weaker than the rest of the shank. Of course, you cannot do this right next to diamonds. But you certainly can do it to the shank bottom, on a ring with diamonds at the top. With care, the top of the ring won’t exceed the temperatures that are safe for diamonds. (And as always, be sure that the diamonds are not treated or otherwise at risk from normal heating, or heat-sink the stones before doing this.)

Depending on the alloy of gold you’re using, and the design of the piece, some gold inlays don’t have to be soldered to the platinum. Instead, heat up the platinum till the gold melts into it, just like solder would have. The platinum won’t melt. Then file off the excess gold. You can use Batterns or other fluxes to help hold solder paillons in place while soldering, but it isn’t needed. However, when soldering-in or fusing-in gold inlay, flux is needed to protect the gold. High karat fairly soft gold (like 18 or 22K) alloys work better in two tone designs than lower karat golds. Platinum and gold have different rates of thermal expansion, and harder gold alloys, especially if soldered to the platinum with softer less strong solders, may tend to crack away again on cooling, or later, as the differing rates of thermal expansion/contraction create stresses in the joint. The softer, high karat golds will simply stretch or compress to accomodate the platinum’s dimensions.

Polish any platinum parts and findings and elements of the design before you assemble them. Heating won’t damage the bright polish, so soldering doesn’t disturb the polish except where the solder has flowed. This means under galleries and the like will need little work to finish up after assembly if you’re careful. And given the greater difficulty of polishing platinum in any case, anything you can do to make that job easier is worth doing. Properly emerying out a surface to fairly fine grades of emery, like 400 or 600 or finer, will greatly speed and improve the polishing process. Take the time to see that each component of a piece is well finished-out before you assemble the piece. Platinum is difficult enough to polish that taking the time to polish the parts of a head before you assemble it, even when you know you are likely to get some tool marks to deal with along the way, will still save you much time later.

A hint here: platinum is hard to polish, but, with a carbide burnisher, very easy to burnish to a wonderful shine. In some cases, it’s much faster than normal polishing sequences, and can leave as good a finish—if not better—especially on small details and areas that are hard to reach. The burnisher can be made from a small piece of carbide rod, ground with diamond wheels to a bullet shape or whatever you wish, and polished with lapidary diamond compounds. I refinish my carbide burnisher from time to time, when I don’t wish to actually fire up the lapidary equipment, with a birch disk, about 2 mm thick, sliced from the end of a 1 inch dowel, and drilled to mount on a pinhole arbor. It’s placed in the flex shaft machine and trued up, then a groove is cut into one face, which is then charged with a little diamond compound. 3,000 grit compound will smooth the carbide, 8,000 or 14,000 will polish it nicely, and a final polish with 50,000 will get it super-glossy. The result of using a truly well-polished burnisher on platinum can be truly wonderful.

Another useful carbide burnisher for dealing with less-than-perfect castings, is a variation on the common “bent burr” trick. An old bur is bent over at one end and cut off so that a little “L”—shaped end is created, maybe 1 or 2 mm offset from the shaft centerline. A little bit of carbide is brazed to that bent end, shaped to form a ball, and then highly polished. Chucked into a flex shaft, at low to medium speed, it will hammer/burnish out porosity very effectively. While a similar tool in steel is effective on gold, it tends to drag too much on the platinum. The carbide does not, burnishing properly. That carbide tool is pretty nice on the problem areas in a gold casting too. A note on using these tools: as you rotary-burnish over an area of porosity, it will look like you’re creating a rather bumpy surface. Some of this is just the hammering action, but some is because you’re compressing sub-surface areas of porosity, causing slight dips in the surface. Work the surface thoroughly this way, then lightly sand smooth again, not cutting so deep as to go through the lowest spots, which were your worst areas of porosity. Obviously, it is much, much better to have a casting which is not porous in the first place, thus not needing this rather abusive finishing technique. But it’s not a perfect world, and casters aren’t perfect either. So there may be times when this stop-gap fixit technique will save your butt on a job or two.

My favorite platinum polishing compounds are the aluminum oxide compounds from Gesswein. You use their 800 grit the same as you’d use tripoli for gold or silver, then the 1200 or 1500 as a pre-polish, and then either their 8000 as a final polish, or their “carrot” compound which leaves a slightly darker, higher colored polish. These compounds have the advantage of being hard enough to cut platinum fairly quickly, so it’s possible to minimize undercutting of solders or gold inlays, if you’ve carefully pre-finished the surfaces with very fine emery paper first. A drawback is that these compounds are quite a bit more costly than most polishing compounds we normally use. For just plain polishing of platinum without inlays or solders to undercut, you’ll find ordinary bobbing compound, especially on a brush, to be useful and fairly fast-cutting.

And last, though I’ve said it already, work clean and carefully. Many problems people have with platinum come from trying shortcuts or being sloppy with seams, cleanliness or other parts of the process. The metal is capable of many things you cannot hope to do in other metals, but it is also less forgiving of carelessness.

A: That should not be a surprise. Any cutting tool will get duller with use. How long your files last depends on how you use them, and on what metals, and how you store them. Good quality, well-made files do last a longer time, given the same use, than poor-quality ones, and even more importantly, well-made ones will generally give you faster, more uniform cutting. But any cutting tool will dull over time with use.

Some files are harder than others, and they may last longer, especially with harder-to-file metals (platinum comes to mind here). It should be mentioned too, that paying a higher price does not always buy you the longest-lasting file. It generally means the most uniform and high quality cutting, and consistency from one file to the next. But just because a file is low in cost doesn’t mean it won’t also perform well. Some of my favorite and longest-lasting files were a cheap close-out special from Allcraft a few years ago: five bucks each for Polish-made hand files. The quality was as good or better than any Grobet file I’ve paid through the nose for, and they’re still going strong after at least five years of daily use.

I’ve also got some large coarse bastard-cut machine files that I got from MSC a couple decades ago, which are still cutting just fine, though they get only infrequent use. They’re good for some things, especially roughing in a wax model, but also for larger metal-filing jobs. Those puppies were Chinese-made, and were reasonably good—worth a lot more to me than the fifty cents each (in a bulk purchase of 50 assorted files) that they cost.

But if you’re really using nitric acid to clean your files, then I understand why they’re not lasting very long. Nitric acid etches the steel. Probably more quickly than it would attack the residue of metals caught in the teeth. That’s a quick way to destroy a file. If a file is already dull, you can get back a certain degree of sharpness with a careful acid etch. But it’s not as durable as the original cut teeth, and it certainly is not a way to routinely clean your files. Coarser files can be easily cleaned with a file card, which is a specially-made wire brush intended for exactly that use. Finer teeth files, too fine for a file card, can still be cleaned with a fine wire brush, or the finer rotary brushes used in flex shafts. This doesn’t always work well, but sometimes it will. Using the edge or corner of a scrap of copper or brass to stroke (or even strike) along the file teeth can remove much of the stuck residue, and a sharp pin will dig out stubborn bits. An ultrasonic cleaner is relatively effective, in some cases, at cleaning files with little work. Steam cleaners also can do a decent job. In both cases, be sure the file is carefully and fully dried so it doesn’t rust afterwards.

Some files, like the FB Dick yellow-tang files, are specially surface treated so metal residue doesn’t stick as much. They are especially marketed for platinum, but they’re good with other metals too. And they’re a bit harder, so they last well. You can also rub the teeth of a clean file with chalk or talc, which helps to prevent metal residue from sticking to the file as much. Make sure they’re stored so that each file doesn’t get rubbed or banged against the other files in storage, if you want the longest life from them.

A: No, you don’t use flux with a laser welder, but with some metals, you’ll get better welds if you use an inert gas shield, usually argon. And yes, they have vent fans that draw welding fumes out the back through a fine filter which traps the metallic fumes. The main danger is to your wallet, and occasionally annoying small burns to the fingers when you miss. They will sting, but don’t do major damage.

Note that welding platinum is the easiest, and 18K yellow gold is also easy. But lower karats of gold, or white golds, become increasingly trickier, and are more benefited by the use of argon shielding. Very high karat yellow gold, like 22K or 24K, is also difficult. Silver welds look better with argon, but it it’s necessary usually. However, silver is so reflective, and such a good heat conductor, that it takes considerably more energy to laser-weld than most other metals. If you’re doing lots of silver in heavier gauges of metal, you may need more than the lowest power lasers to get decent results in a reasonable amount of time. But for pieces that are mostly wire constructions, even the basic units should be fine.

Alpha Supply in Bremerton WA is a tools dealer who sells, among other things, new laser welders (I think mostly the current latest model CPP machines) to jewelry factories in India. They take back, in trade, the old units, which are usually Siro Alphalasers, either the ALS-35 or ALS-35S, or similar units. Depending on the degree of refurbishment needed to get them running, and which model (the ALS-35S is higher power) and its age, etc, they’ve been selling them here in the U.S. for prices between $13K and $17K or so. The Siro lasers are the same ones that B&D Sales sells, and also are the ones pictured in the Rio Grande tools catalog.

I don’t know how much the new versions differ from these older lasers, but it’s my impression that the design isn’t being modified a whole lot. They’re fairly simple, lacking lots of bells and whistles, but seem like reasonably sturdy lasers. They’re like used cars: don’t expect them to run like new, and some may need replacement parts sooner rather than later. These things are not like a rolling mill, which if cared for will last almost forever. They’re filled with high powered electronics. Power supplies can fail, optics can need replacement, computer control boards can go bad, and if you use it a lot, then expect to replace the flash lamp (for $400 to $600) yearly or near to it. But with that said, these lasers are of a generally well-accepted design that’s been working for a number of years, and are likely to work well for more years as well.

A: I’ve got several for you. If you’re using the one of the transparent silicone rubbers, you can embed a small printed paper label within the mold when you pour it. Or, cut a slit into the rubber and insert such a label after making the mold. Either way, you can read it through the rubber.

If you’re using opaque rubbers, then it gets a bit more complex. What I did, and ended up doing with ordinary vulcanized molds too, is to take some small pieces of aluminum sheet, and using reversed metal letter-number stamps (right-reading, so they stamp a reversed letter), I made a series of little plates comprising a small font of the letters and numbers I needed. These can be stuck to the inside of the mold frame, so they will leave an impression in the rubber. The plate sinks into the rubber and the little plates are pried out and saved for reuse. The letter or number then reads correctly and is raised from that recessed surface. This works for generic labeling, giving the mold a stock number, date, etc. It’s not as useful if you wish to put detailed info onto the mold, but you get the idea. A bit of work is required to make the initial set of stamped pieces, but after that, it’s quick and easy to use.

A: Take out a standard hardware store type drill bit and look at its larger, easier to see tip. The tips on your little ones should generally look the same: two planes coming to a chisel-like narrow point at the center. The two planes defined at the front end by the spiral cut into the drill, and are inclined away both from the center, and the flute of the spiral. The leading edge of each of those planes is sloping up, in the direction of rotation, so it can cut into the work. A dull bit will either have bits of these surfaces broken off, or the center chisel or leading edges/cutting edges will be dulled and rounded over.

Small drill bits can be easily resharpened, once one has a good feel for what those angles need to be to cut to, as well as having something to sharpen the bit with. I like the very thin (.009″) “flexible” separating disks. Their sides have a much smoother surface than the more common gray ones (which can also be used, but which cut much more coarsely, and on tiny bits, this makes a difference). Those nice flat sides will cut a nice clean tip on even the tiniest bits, if you can use good enough magnification to see what you’re doing. A good loupe or, at the least, a high-power Optivisor may be needed. Once this is mastered, you can use about half the length of the flutes on the small drills with several resharpenings after breaking off points. The flutes get shallower as you move down the shank of the bit, so after you’ve got a ways down the bit, resharpening leads to a wider and wider center “web”, the area in the center of the bit between the flute, which leads to a wider and wider center chisel. It still works, but not as well. With the somewhat less minuscule bits, you can thin the web right at the point by grinding the flute a bit deeper, but this gets tricky to do. Until this is mastered, take comfort in knowing that the small drill bits are pretty cheap. And the factory points are generally more uniform than what you’ll get resharpening them yourself.

So it may be easiest, at first, to just buy your bits new. And if they seem dull, they probably are. Even slightly dull drill bits just don’t work well enough to bother with. When dull, even a bit, they will heat up, destroying the temper of the bit. Even high speed bits get messed up by this, getting more brittle. So then the dull or break even more easily…As to your other question, a bit of rust on old burs might not kill them. It’s relative. How much rust? And more important, what was the condition of the bur first? Small jewelers’ burs are often just a high quality carbon steel, which are wonderfully sharp, and not too costly, when new, but they burn out and dull somewhat quickly. That’s why they often get sold in six-packs. If the burs you have were sharp before they rusted, then they’ll likely still cut OK, though perhaps not quite as smoothly. If they were dull to start with, they won’t be any sharper now.

A: Try just a standard cheap wood bench pin, and a similarly cheap wooden ring clamp with leather jaws. Consider these tools unfinished as sold. You need to shape them, especially the bench pin, to serve your needs. Notches can be cut in the pin to better support the ring clamp while you work, and the ring clamp itself can be notched to hook onto an edge of the bench pin. The GRS bench pin holder, which you can buy separately, is a great system and costs much less than their whole setup, but you can get other cheaper bench pin clamps too.

If you use one, you are not limited to just one bench pin. You can set up one for piercing flat sheet, another for filing castings that may work better with angled surfaces on the pin, and another with a curve cut into the edge shaped to better support the ring clamp. While I have, and use, the GRS systems, frankly, for the bulk of my work, I use the standard wood clamps. They are faster to move around, faster to change workpieces, and are somewhat more mobile for different positions. Most of the world’s jewelry gets made with the cheap traditional bench pins and holding tools, so don’t feel you must get the GRS system. It’s a great tool, but it’s not something you cannot work without.

A: The first draw bench I ever built, back when I was just out of school and on a very restricted budget, was about as simple and cheap as it gets. It was just a series of one-inch deep holes drilled in a piece of 2″ × 4″ lumber. That got C-clamped to the workbench top, with one end butted up against the vise that was already mounted there. Then I took a length of sturdy iron rod or pipe (I don’t recall which it was) and attached a hook made from quarter-inch steel rod, attaching it about four inches from one end so that with the end of the steel rod inserted in a hole, the hook was just about level with the vise jaws. I used vise-grip pliers, with a ring attached to one end, as a draw tong.

After fixing the pliers to the end of the wire, I’d catch the ring with the hook, and use the long lever of the bar, with its short end stuck in a hole, to pull the pliers along, switching holes every few inches. It worked well enough, though slower than a “real” draw bench, and it tended to give the drawn wire slight step marks from each time I’d have to interrupt the draw to change holes. How much power it gives you is simply a function of the length and strength of the lever bar. Since at that time I only needed such a thing occasionally, it worked fine for me.

A: Usually you can hear a buzzing or humming sound, from the circuitry. That’s not the operative frequency of the cleaner, just other noise that’s produced incidentally. The surface of the liquid (never run an ultrasonic cleaner without liquid in the tank) will show signs of vibration, jumping around and perhaps generating standing waves.

If you’re still unsure, or want to check how effective or powerful a running ultrasonic is, cut a piece of ordinary kitchen-type aluminum foil, long enough to go corner to corner across the tank diagonally, and wide enough to extend out of the liquid when this piece is placed vertically from corner to corner in the tank. After 20 or 30 seconds or so, take it out and hold it up to the light. It should be punched full of tiny holes. They may not be evenly distributed, especially in less expensive ultrasonics, which will have “hot spots” and dead spots depending on the relative strength of the activity, but you should see at least some holes generally distributed around the foil.

A more powerful ultrasonic might not, after 30 seconds, leave much of the foil, especially if it’s standard-weight and not heavy-duty foil. Some of the more powerful ones can turn a piece of foil into shredded tatters in ten seconds or so. These, actually, aren’t as common in jewelry cleaning, as that powerful an action could easily damage softer metals, especially silver.