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Shaping & Attaching the Bail

Lesson 5 from: Beginning Soldering for Jewelry Making

Bonnie Heras

Shaping & Attaching the Bail

Lesson 5 from: Beginning Soldering for Jewelry Making

Bonnie Heras

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Lesson Info

5. Shaping & Attaching the Bail

Lesson Info

Shaping & Attaching the Bail

So our next step after those air, all attached one piece, we clean in the pickle that we're going to add our bail that's a little top component there that allows you to have a place to put your necklace wire or using an actual premade chain in this context. So we are already cut out my bail here and it's been a kneel so it's a piece of mail that I'm gonna ben with pliers, I'm gonna use my round nose pliers to start create the shape and a pair of flat player so these around nose pliers that are tapered and round all the way around, you can use chain knows which are taper, but our flat jawed or flat for bracing it, and there is a combination plier that you can get many fund players, actually, that is square and round. That could be good for not creating div it's. So I'm gonna kind of bend this over in the center here, and I'm actually going to use this combination plier, so I'm just going to use my hands. You can put this in advice if you need you and ben this over that way, grabbing a p...

air of pliers to hold the other side to finish the bend this together to create the basic shape of our bill receipt up. Now, when we're saw during this on it's gonna be different than what we were doing before, so this is a fairly large gap right here. I want this to kind of grip onto the back of my medal, so let's say our pieces already saw turd on our p concert together, we're going to saw her on our bail now to our base peace now for best placement I'm gonna actually bend this so it grips sent like jaws on top of my piece here, so I'm squishing it and we see that squishing it together so that the thickness of the material just using, you know my hands, you could support it that way so that the gap there well, it'll just slide in see that now if I made it a little too tight actually that fits just right, so it slips in there. We see that little in the back support it's hitting there on both angles. It's centered now, um, that would be cleaned with sandpaper before I place it on here in a place flux on it remember it's silver? I don't want any fires scale now, the tighter that fit is it won't, the better it is because it won't shift around, it won't get anywhere you don't want it to be now. Let's, add another tool in here to kind of make our life a little bit easier. Well, so there's many different ways. You can do this so you can have it laying flat here, sauder one side, and then saw her the other side. Or you can use a third arm to hold it up like that if it's a tight enough grip where it can place where the jaws come together and it holds it like that. Um, for the sake of keeping its simplistic, I'm gonna lay it flat. Now I use hard and I was going to use medium when I attached this piece here. So assuming this is attached there now, if you're feeling very skillful, you could do this all at once. But for the sake of keeping it simplistic, that's, why we do everything separately so I'm going to use medium sauder this time. So when I attached this piece to here, it would have been a medium. And then the bail to the base would have been a medium as well. Let me just cut myself a few pieces of medium. Is there any questions, john? No, I think they were really intently following along, actually. Really wonderful international audience we've actually got iran in the champion's I'm not sure we've had on iranians you have forced a welcome to man it's great to have you raise think about our jeweler's here in the studio audience any questions have you attempted any of these types of projects before they were shaking their heads way had a great comment actually in the chat rooms that said I can't wait to get out and buy stuff and get going I'm sure our ladies here are feeling exactly the same way great yeah and if there's any question about other tools and what not weaken told the address that so this is prepped we have our flux on everything that sought has been cut you know sometimes it's really good to prop it up where you can be really closes see what's going on so I actually have this another sauntering till we can have here slow lazy susan that has some fire retardant little promise rocks in here and I just put that up on there so just a little bit higher so I'm not bending down because sometimes you can't really see what's going on you're working really small here and so you need it you have it kind of at a height that's comfortable to think about you could sit down when you do this as well I prefer to stand so whatever makes you comfortable when you're handling these various tools so I'm gonna start by melting the flux, medium sized flame, even hate you always want to evenly heat your medal when you are getting ready to ah, sauder, because you're basically wanting the medal, the two pieces that you're joining together to reach the same temperature at the same time. That's what makes this order flow? And so if one is smaller, like our bail here, if I just spent all my time heating that, of course, then you have the temperature, but this big guy over here but I'm trying to attach tio is not going to get up to the temperature that it needs to in time, and so the sauder follows the heat so all the sauder would then jump onto the smaller piece because it's physically hotter and then they're not joined together, so I'm gonna add my sauder now before it was amounted to the surface, I'm actually physically going to place my little piece of sought her up against the joint like that, you see that I'll put in the front here so it's a little more visible now that peace is sought her and get a close up on that, believe it or not that's actually way too much on I'm doing this on purpose you can see how big the excess amount of but the puddle will be, believe it or not you have to think the thin edge here let's say on this medal, for instance, same thicknesses of this medals were using twenty wage all the way along um that's all you're doing is that little thin edge to the others that edge so it's not a lot of surface area there so kind of keep that in mind so now I'm going to start heating evenly so it's even heat every time you take your torch off the metal it drops in temperatures you're going to bring it back up to temperature so I'm focusing on the big piece too little time on the small piece big piece spent some time on the small piece when you see the sauder start to flow then you focus on the he directly on the joint but on lee then so you see it started to flow right there puddled out and it's attached. Now I'm gonna flip it over pick up the piece here addison sauder now tweezers not always your friend that's why I mention the slaughtering picnic sometimes though it will be really difficult to pick up the sauder with your, uh tweezers so because I just want to fly everywhere so you don't have to use that you can use the slaughtering pick like I showed you before so even heat and it just flows trade into that joint they see that you only need to say did you see it flow? You can take your flame out of there because it can re flow and adjust and move like it just slumped a little bit because I was I was reheating it so you could see it on dh shifted a hair but um you can re flow you're saw her a few times if you need to, but usually after re flowing it twice it starts to get brittle starts to lose its structural integrity and so you don't really at that point it's better to saw armenia's who file or sand off the excess sawyer and then add new piece and you would have to stop quench pickle the whole nine before you do it cause once again has to be clean and all that so that's attached turning my torch off definitely giving this a minute before I quench it because if now that has sought on there, we really don't want it to get brittle and it will get brittle all the metal will get brittle if you clench it too soon. Um in this instance where the shifted on me a little bit, I could easily when it's clean still it's still fairly clean so it would be black if it wasn't to give you context um then I could I could unflavored that what I just did and shift it where I want tio so don't feel like it's, all permanent. If it was kind of messy, brittle started to melt down. Then he would have to saw and remake the parts. But in this situation, easy fix, clean it, re flow the sauder by putting flux on and just heating it up. I could just, like, prop it up on something, and then pull it off and adjusted, or to shift it, while it's still hot.

Class Materials

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Bonnie Heras - Beginning Soldering Supply List.pdf
Bonnie Heras - Soldered Pendant Pattern.pdf

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