Word of the day: HOWEVER.

WELCOME TO THE NOVELLA THAT IS WEEK TEN! Grab a hot cup of coffee and bring your thinking caps, friends.

I left off last week discussing the intricacies of chain making. And I believe that I may have discussed how time consuming this project was. Well, it was. Now, up until the end of that project, I was led to believe that chain making may be one of the time consuming aspects of this field.

HOWEVER…..

We all wound up the chain at some point on Monday. For most of us we came crashing into the finish line with sweat pouring from our brows and victory grins on our faces throwing high fives at each other ten minutes before the end of class. Fine. Totally fine. Nothing like a little unit cohesion now and then. We’re a team after all.

NOW. The second project….. Mrs. Millers Charm. So ok, here’s were I reflect momentarily on past blogs. I am full aware that every week I say something about the difficulty level of the said project we’re working on, and lament my mistakes or frustrations. And I appreciate all of the careful lessons I learn along the way. As a matter of fact I CRAVE those lessons, as it is a reason I am here, right? So upping the difficulty level only intensifies my frustration AND my need/desire to do much better, stronger work then I did on the last project. With that said…… The charm.....

This project involved producing a heart shaped charm (two identical halves) and mounting a bezel set marquise in the center of it. This is again, one of those deceptively simple sounding tasks we all thought would take us a couple days max and we’d move on. Not so, ladies and gentleman. Not so.

We had to start the project by making a practice bezel on this brass mounting thingy. We were told that if we made this one well, we could use it on the charm. Also included in that lecture was the warning that setting the marquise like this is misleadingly simple, and to think think think about how the stone is shaped, and to take that into consideration when cutting the seat, adjusting the bezel blahblahblah. *brushes off instructors 30 years of experience and warning with wave of hand*…..We of course all took off with our tiny chunks of stock and proceeded to act like we knew what the hell we were doing since we're masters at this, right?

Here’s how I did on the practice bezel. I got the thing formed to my stone, so I had to solder the seams on it. I did one side of it just fine. I flipped the thing over to do the remaining seam... and three milliseconds before I dropped the solder on it, half of the bezel took off like a NASA space shuttle launch and flew to my right. Just pinged off. So I swing to my right to find it on the floor sizzling its way through the industrial carpeting. Fire extinguisher of choice: Chuck Taylor’s. Here’s the kicker. That was only HALF of the half melting its way through the carpet. I still cant find the other quarter of that first bezel. Ha! AND THEN on my second bezel attempt I got it made just fine. I got the seat cut. I popped the stone in and set the bezel. Awesome! So at this point all I have to do is heat it up, remove it from the brass thingy and set it aside. Right? NOT SO FAST superwoman! I fired up my torch, took the thing off and right as I was singing praises to my classmate about my bezel, I instinctively (bad insticts by the way) chucked this thing into my water jar….WHICH, if it had no stone would have been fine, but thermal shock does a doozy on fragile things.. See, its pure common sense. You take something (a coffee pot, a dish from the oven, a diamond) heat it up to high temps and submerge it in something far cooler then the air, lets say, you get a broken what-ever-you-submerged. So tossing it in the water was like a slow motion nightmare for me. Because when you quench something it makes this distinctive sizzle-ping sound, and this sound and that moment of realization as to what I’d done caused my head to bang on my bench a few times. I completely fractured the stone. Solution: we obliterated the stone by satisfactorily hammering the thing into dust, and luckily my bezel was ok, so I was able to pop another stone right in and adjust the bezel. Amen. HOWEVER, when I reset the bezel I had to sink it in the poop stick, ok? So when I heated up the crap to remove the bezel, it sank, I tried to grab it with my tweezers, and it sank more, I panicked and watched as it turned on its side and resembled a scaled version of the sinking of the Titanic. When I DID get it out of the goo, it was coated and stuck to my tweezers. Time in acetone: 45 minutes. Set back: 1 hour. But this wasn’t just my disease friends, three other of my classmates did the exact same thing and within minutes of me doing it, which created an impromptu lecture on thermal shock. You’re welcome, busy classmates! My pal Charlie had a similar experience with completing his bezel, and then went to take the thing off the brass but managed to heat the bezel quicker than the brass which promptly melted and resulted in a perfect bezel being reduced to a tiny abstract sculpture. What to do? Start over! The average number of bezels crated and destroyed seems to be three. Some did five. I did 2.

Needless to say, this deviously simple looking task took most of us all of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to complete. The remaining part of the charm was also a bit tricky since it involved forming two pieces of wire into the exact same shape. Some creative variances were allowed. The first half was the easiest to form, but it was matching the second half to the first exactly that took the longest amount of time. BUT in comparison to making the bezel, it was a job all of us were equipped to handle well. The only tricky part was filing your angles correctly. Other than that, it went well! Time of completion: 13 hours on the dot. see: the back of my job card.

So week ten is over and we’re officially into the double digit weeks. Week 11 is yet another quiz, which we’re all just praying to pass, and my third bench test is on Thursday. I should be having another one-on-one meeting sometime week 12 to let me know my standing in the class. Stay tuned for a progress report! Next week we shove forward into setting more fancy cuts! Whoot!

The sun is shining, its Easter and I have the day off and my sunscreen on, see you next week my friends!

Be well!