Ring from Scrap... Part II

This morning I welded some parts together.  

The silver band is assembled and sized.  Since I don't have ring mandrel (yet), I turned my own in brass on my metal lathe.  It's good enough for now. ;-) 

I welded two silver sides to the side of the band and two brass sides to form the ends of the "stone" bezel.

There is some "filling" to do to refine the bezel, it also needs to be blended into the band.

I also need to further refine the shape of the band.  For comfort, the back of the band should be a bit narrower from the front.

Making a Ring from Scratch... or is that Scrap ?

One side benefit of making jump rings is that you always end up with some scraps of nice clean silver.

This picture shows the various stages to go through in order to create usable material from scraps.

1. Collect your scraps, don't mix metals ;-)

2. Melt them in a crucible, a MAPP gas torch works best for this and don't forget to heat up the spout of the crucible, otherwise your metal will cool off before it gets into the mold.

3. Pour the melted silver into the mold to make a shape of silver.  My mold has several sizes of rods.

4. Hammer the rod into shape.  Make sure to anneal the "blob" several times as you go, otherwise, you'll end up with unusable broken pieces.

5. From the flatten piece, trace some nice straight pieces and cut them with a shear, less material loss this way.

6. Hammer your pieces into the desired shape using a ring mandrel or some steel rod.

Ambitious Silver Chain...

After Christmas, my wife and I decided to work on a common project.  It combines jump ring making and shaping with lots of torch work.

All components are made of "fine" silver.  It is very soft and easy to shape.  But it is pretty close to "impossible" to solder.

The picture shows the various components of the chain.  My wife makes the jump rings, then their  joints fused with the torch, then she forms them. Meanwhile, I make the pieces that look like push pins.  These are short lengths of silver wire with the ends melted into a ball.

Then, the fun part begins.  Assembling the chain links together.  This is accomplished by alternatively flipping the links and connecting them with the pins... I use the torch to melt the other end of the pin into a ball, that locks the chain link in place.

We have not decided if this is going to be a bracelet or a necklace.  It will probably depend on my patience. ;-)

Silver PMC Leaf...

Here's a really cool piece that my wife made with silver PMC slurry.  A while back, we took a course on how to use silver PMC to make interesting shapes that would be practically impossible to make any other ways.   This is an excellent example of this.

My wife picked a leaf out of our garden and very patiently applied something like 20 thin coats of PMC slurry.

During the Christmas break I finally got the time to install a proper fan above my welding/soldering area in the shop.  We were finally able to fire the piece.  After pickling and some deburring, this is what the leaf looks like.  It turned out to be rather heavy (solid silver after all).  It will make an interesting brooch or pendant.

Arts and Craft Copper Bracelet...

This is a copper bracelet that I made during the Christmas break.

I recycled a piece of copper pipe that I cut lengthwise with a hacksaw.  I used a cold chisel to spread the tube open and flattened it on my anvil with a ball pein hammer.

I cut the piece roughly to the size of the bracelet, deburred it and cleaned-up the copper surface.

I drew my interpretation of 3 McIntosh roses on the surface with a sharpie pen.  I then drilled small holes in the corners of the shapes in order to thread my jeweller's saw to cut-out the shapes.  I refined the shapes with small jeweller's files and cleaned-up the edges with ribbons of sandpaper cloth.

I then cut the bracelet to size and shaped it with my plastic mallet against a wood form.  I have not decided on the finish for the piece, so it's sitting on my desk for now.

Silver Bracelet...

This is a silver bracelet that I made while attending a class in the fall last year.  

I cut the silver segments, then gave them a full turn twist, while holding them in pliers.   I did not anneal the silver as I wanted the segments to hold their shapes.

I formed the connecting rings and filed a flat at the joint.  I then got a lot of practice soldering the rings to the end of the segments.

I made the elongated jump rings, connecting the segments together, then soldered the joints of the rings.

I made the catch in a similar pattern of the segments and jump rings.  I soldered a small connecting ring to the catch bar and attached it to the last segment.  The catch ring is sized so the bar just slides in but will not accidentally come loose.

The bracelet then spent a bit of time in pickle to remove the soldering by-products.  I then carefully filed and sanded all the solder joints.  Finally it spent a few moments in the tumbler filled with stainless steel shot.

About this blog...

Just a little space on this huge Interweb thing, where I write about my attempts at creating interesting pieces of jewelry in silver and copper.