Monday, September 7, 2009

Assembling shanks and sets and more sizing
















So today we started with this wide band tapered ring with the embellishment on the edges of a raised wire. The goal was to size it up 1 and 1/2 sizes and then file the piece that we put in to have the same embellished wire shape as the rest of the ring. This project was pretty fun. I really liked the challenge of recarving in the pattern...even though it's quite a simple pattern.

We carved in the embellishment by take a saw blade and gently creating a divot while keep the new carving round. Then we blended it all together with a safety edge needle file to get the shape you see to the side.

We also put together a shank with a tiffany head. The goal of this was to file the knife edge perfectly so the right angles of the tiffany head were comfortably resting on the angles of the knife edge and there were no visible gaps and you couldn't torque the head out of the shank.

I haven't fully polished any of the above projects, they are still in a very rough state...in case you were wondering why they didn't look finished, it's because they're not :-)

Tomorrow we are assembling a marque ring.

2 comments:

  1. It's fascinating to hear about what you're doing in your class - metals are such a foreign medium from what I'm used to! I'm looking forward to learning more about the process.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks it's really great to hear feedback. I know no one is really reading this, but I think it'll be really interesting to document the process a little bit. Do you have a blog I could follow??

    ReplyDelete