Diamond eternity ring

A customer has asked me to make an eternity ring for her in 18ct white gold using some diamonds which she has bought abroad. The stones are about 20pts each and there are 14 of them. A quick calculation shows that this wont be quite enough to go all the way around as she would like them in a channel setting and therefore close together. An investigation shows that a casting for this job is unavailable so time to make something from scratch!

Dog with a broken leg

Not a jewellery repair I know but one people realise that you are handy with a blowtorch you get asked to do all kinds of things. This bronze of a greyhound turned out not to be bronze at all but brass! The bronze patina was had been faked with various techniques but the problem now was the broken leg and the other break where the tail should have been attached to the base. These areas had been repaired badly, drilled pinned screwed and glued so after removing the pins and screws and burning off the glue I re-pinned with brass and brazed around each join until satisfied that I had a good joint.

The joint was over brazed until strong.

Then ground back to the correct profile.

The repaired area was then treated with nitric acid to darken and age the surface.

 Then a matching lacquer colour was mixed and applied.

Masonic bracelet

I made the bracelet some time ago melting and rolling the metal for the 3 bars and letting them into a figaro bracelet. I then had to create the 3 symbols. The Triple Tau needed to be inlaid with red enamel and I thought long and hard about how I would cut the shape into the gold. I toyed with the idea of getting the recess engraved by hand but in the end decided to utilize my homebuilt CNC machine again. After writing the G code to perform the operation I then had to secure the bracelet to the work area by means of a piece of perspex cut with a rectangular hole and 4 screw holes with which to fix it. I was in the middle of the final pass when my drill burnt out!  Nevertheless a successful operation which after hand cutting of the corners inlaid easily with cold enamel.

The cross was set centrally with a ruby to represent a rose and then engraved with stems and leaves which were touched in with green enamel and then the edge was millgrained.

The Square and compass actually came from the top of a signet ring to which was added a small round setting at the top and set with a sapphire.

LG

Making a clock hand

I have been building a small engraving/CNC machine in my cellar at home and intend to use it for jewellery applications. As it happens the first job which would benefit from the use of such a machine was to create the missing hand for a wall clock. The clock is oversize and so the hand is approx 140mm long with an antiqued gold finish. I intended to cut the hand out of aluminium with a fine milling bit but even using the smallest I could get (1.2mm) I would not be able to cut the finer parts of the piece and using a pointed carborundum cutting tool of approx 30 degrees seemed to chew up the edges of the thin aluminium sheet (0.5mm). Using Autocad 97 lite I drew a longer version of hour hand which I had already and printed it out as you can see above. This was no mean feat as I have never used Autocad before so it took a while to learn how to use it.


Next I used imported the image into Lazycam and used Mach3 to engrave the image onto the aluminium using a non rotating tungsten carbide scriber bit mounted in my spindle.

Then back to old tech to hand cut the hand along the scribed lines, it didnt take long so with a bit of filing up it was done.

Finally after putting the hand longways in the vice and putting a slight bend along its length for rigidity, I spray painted in gold and black and bolted it on!

Cuttlefish Casting

You want me to what!!

In this technological world its always good to have a basic down to earth technique up you sleeve and cuttlefish casting is a good example of this. This method is great for producing basic 3 dimensional shapes as long as you don't mind a bit of filing up and finishing. As you can see from the job sheet I have been asked to produce 2 rose gold balls, from scrap links supplied by the customer, to terminate a torq bangle which I have already made.

Dry Bones!

As luck would have it my father has just given me a large bag of cuttlefish bones which he picked up on a trip to Jersey. They are still wet so they will need a few days on the radiator or in the sun to fully dry out. Cuttlefish bones can be picked up from many beaches in the UK, from jewellery supplies retailers like us www.gouldsjewellers.co.uk and even petshops.

As you can see i've knocked up a few of these before. Now for the melting and pouring of the gold!

As you can see the cast piece is quite rough with large sprues and flow lines so now fow the trimming up and finishing.

And thats it !

The finished job!