Let's talk about...Jewellery

Annealing is very important technique and one needs to know about it before starting to work with metal. Let's start with theory.
When you work on metal through hammering or other forms of compression, molecules making your piece up are also compressed, eventually becoming non-malleable (hard to bend) or to put it using different term - work hardened. If you try to work on work hardened metal there are big chances that you will crack it.
You can buy pre-annealed metal, but if you have a lot of forming to do - and that's what usually happens, unless all your pieces are flat- you are better off learning about annealing.

Annealing should be done in slightly darkened room - it's easier to see the colour change of metal.
Tools needed for annealing are : soldering block, torch, reverse action tweezers, piece of metal for annealing and a jar of water.

Health and safety issues  are just common sense - don't touch heated metal with your hands - use tweezers. Don't touch the flame or put your hands close to it. Don't keep any flammable materials close to annealing area. Crack window open for good ventilation.  Stay focused.


First step of annealing: Put your work on soldering block and heat metal according to table below, using torch. The torch flame is hottest at the very point of blue flame, so try to keep that area on metal. Observe colour change carefully, and as soon as whole piece is correct colour (usually variation of red), turn torch off.

Second step of annealing: grab metal with reverse action tweezers and either quench - put into jar of cold water - or allow to cool slowly (you can speed up process by putting it on steel block).

                                             Different metals are annealed in different way.

Metal	Annealing method
Low – carat gold alloys Sterling silver Fine silver Copper Gilding metal	Heat to a dull, cherry red and quench as soon as redness disappears.
White gold Brass	Heat to bright red and cool in the air – do not quench.
Aluminium	Coat surface with soap and heat until it turns black – allow to cool slowly.
Mild steel	Heat to red heat and allow to cool slowly.

 

Tools are every jewellery maker's best friends - especially if they are a good quality, solid ones. With some of them you can get away with spending less money, or buying them second hand, but some are definitely worth investing in. You don't need to buy every single thing that I will be talking about - it all depends on if you intend to use it or not, and how often, but there are few basic tools you really need if you plan to take jewellery making seriously.

These are what I call measuring and marking out tools: steel ruler (not plastic!), dividers (drawing out circles, parallel lines), scriber (for scribing out lines, marking out) and center punch (for punching indentations in metal before drilling).

  Caliper - for measuring thickness of metal. You can buy digital or standard version - personally I prefer digital - I find it difficult to calculate thickness on standard caliper.


Piercing saw with fixed frame - used for the cutting and piercing after drilling out holes.


There are also ones with adjustable frame, which are probably bit more expensive, but help you to save up on saw blades - you simply adjust frame to smaller piece of saw blade (something you can't do with fixed). But I believe that for beginners, fixed saw is perfectly acceptable.

Files - standard, flat one and needle files are used for filing metal and general straightening out edges after cutting out piece. Size corresponds to area you need to file - needle files are used for small areas, or filing inside of the pierced area.

Bigger files are usually bought without the handles, and to avoid serious injury you need to put them in, either by heating end of the file until red, putting wooden handle and hitting with the hammer, or drilling holes in the handle starting with thick and ending with a thin drill.


Pliers are useful for forming thin pieces of the metal, wire or holding stuff in place when filing.
My set includes snipe nose pliers, half round pliers, as well as flat and round pliers.

Shears - also known as the tin cutters - for cutting thinner pieces of sheet or wire. Absolutely amazing are Maun parallel pliers - I just have a pair of flat ones, but having whole set is on my wish list.

Tweezers - useful in the annealing or soldering - for holding hot pieces of the metal. Displayed  here are my standard tweezers for putting pieces of the solder and curved reverse action ones (lost my straight reverse action tweezers in the workshop).

Some of the soldering equipment - I will talk about them in more detail later on - solder, brush, borax cone and borax dish.

My absolute favorite - pendant motor/pendant drill. I'm proud owner of Millbro. This is one of those tools worth investing in -  you can use whole variety of rotary tools with it - drills, burrs, mops and brushes etc. It's not used only for drilling, but also texturing, polishing and overall finishing your pieces. It's easy to use as well, controlled by foot pedal, leaving your hands free to hold whatever you are working on and move rotary tool.


Some of the tools to use with drill - basic set to attach rotary tools to pendant motor with collets, variety of cutting burrs and diamond burrs.
Last but not least - hammers. Planishing hammer, jobbing/ ball pein hammer and raw hide mallet. Planishing and ball pein should be kept in top condition, highly polished and well taken care of, because every scratch on hammer leaves mark on surface of metal you are hitting. Also you don't need both of these, and you don't use them as often as raw hide mallet - it can be wooden, raw hide or even rubber hammer meaning that it doesn't leave mark on the surface of metal.

Some of the other stuff worth mentioning, but not photographed as of now:  engineers square (for measuring right angles), buff sticks (for buffing after filing), saw blades (for saw), drills (for pendant motor), torch and soldering block (as part of soldering equipment).
Obviously bench to work on, and bench peg are a must, but I found that as long as you can attach bench peg to normal desk, you're fine.
 That's it for today.
  
                                                                      Stay golden!