Pt 78 pronounced plat-nem, and the consequences of large torches.

I was driving Monday morning, feeling more or less exhausted (less exhausted with every slug of coffee), and at this intersection I pulled up behind a car that had the following messages adhered to its back windshield:
1) party naked.
2) pursue insanity
At that moment with the mild post-weekend fatigue and the cumulative stress of the past five months of school-work- sleep I truly laughed out loud . And I thought: Done and done.
This week was another one of those blurry ones I’ve been writing about for the last 4 weeks. For those of you with short attention spans : ring, ring and lasers, lasers, platinum, platinum and lasers, large torches, fireball, stab wound. For those of you interested in hearing about the whole story, read on.

Monday we revved up the week with the completion of that free form ring. The good news is Don figured out no one was on schedule and gave us the entire day to finish it, instead of the half day he had originally planned. Which set us back a half day on the schedule, but no one was angry about it. Here’s the great thing about being behind on the schedule: Don gets to decide if we skip a project to stay on track or to shove forward and freak us out. His decision was to skip a project. Wanna know what it was going to be? Anyone? Guesses?

Here are some choices, and you may only pick one answer.
1)chain repair
2)chain repair
OR
3)chain repair.
Anyway if I could hug the guy I would, but I’m sure it’d violate some rule or something. NO CHAIN REPAIRS! Whoot! *does tiny victory jig*

Tuesday (and Wednesday) we headed feet first into Harry and Shari’s Wedding ( the project names kill me). This project was probably my favorite lately. It consisted of an engagement ring with an emerald cut stone flanked on both sides by tapered baguettes, and a wedding band that hugs up on the engagement ring with 2 tapered baguettes as well. It was a really pretty set, honestly, and maybe its because I’m a fan of emerald cuts and baguettes. I just like the way they look. Not having ever set baguettes in my life, this took a second to figure out though. The first one’s the hardest for me because I’m so paranoid about doing it right that I forget I don’t know HOW to do it right. So I sit there with my burs and *ehnn-ehn-ehn-ehn* push the metal around, check with my loupe, push, check, swear, cut and MAYBE like a half hour later (seriously) I finally got one stone in. but here’s the thing: once I got that one in I knew exactly how to set the other three, so three went in about a half hour total. Again, seriously. And the emerald cut was easy to set, except the prongs on this puppy were thicker than my skull so it took a few minutes for me to chew through them. But here’s a picture of what it looks like 90% done (I have to finish it still)Thursday and Friday was what they like to call “The Platinum Experience”. Since platinum is more expensive then a kidney transplant, they only give us two days to play with it. Wednesday afternoon we had to break out some cleaning supplies and clean our benches out for the platinum work. We could have no gold or silver dust on the tops, in the trays, in our files, on our sandpaper sticks etc etc. so we spent a good 45 minutes cleaning. Reason being platinum’s high melting temperature. Gold and silver melt at a far lower temperature, thus, if you had all of this junk laying around, you could contaminate the platinum. Makes sense. Thursday morning we were greeted by larger torches, and their resident platinum tool kits and a job bag with platinum stock, head, a piece of gold wire and a stone. Basically an engagement ring with gold trim. Also, In our tool boxes were the safety glasses you HAVE to wear when working with platinum, and they are essentially what you would see on a welder, smaller scale. And any time you give overgrown children a new toy, you have to allot ten minutes for the excitement to wear off.

After we all came down from newtoybuzz, he started the most excruciating three part video series on platinum EVER, which was a buzz kill right off the bat. All I have to say about those videos is they were informative, but the narrator spoke so fast I felt like I was at an auction, so most of it went in one ear and our the other. And I fought my droopy eyes the entire time.

Post-video wake up consisted of Don lecturing us on eye safety (you can jack your retinas up if you don’t wear the goggles.) saying “No one wants to hire a blind jeweler, so wear the goggles people”. We were also shown how to adjust our larger flames for different platinum applications and how to weld and solder it (I had no idea you could weld it. But then again I have never done more that polish it before this week) with the torch, and how to laser weld (there’s a difference) it on the machine.
Me on the laser welder!!!

After numbing our brains, we were turned loose with instructions to “have fun” with it, because SURPRISE, its not a graded project. We were all immediately relieved and happy for the break, so the platinum experience was truly and experience. I loved working with it. I loved even more that the pressure to produce was lifted and we were allowed to have fun with it. I found it easier to set stones in it, it filed like butter and the clean up wasn’t as bad as I thought, just more steps. So I’m officially in love with the metal! Its just unfortunate that its so damn expensive and different to work with.

At some point on Tuesday my 16 year-old prodigy classmate and I were eyeballing our new torches for platinum and putting on appropriate tips for annealing the metal. And im in the process of digging out my torch sparker when I HEAR the gas on hers flowing next to me and then I hear “sparksparkspark” as she grinds her lighter a few times her torch to life…. And as I turn around slooooooowwwwwly to tell her to ease up on the gas, this fireball *KA-BLOOOFFFS* out of her torch and freaked both of us out sufficiently enough to sort of squeal in unison. Which made everyone laugh. But I FELT THE HEAT from that thing! So I teased her for the rest of the day about trying to burn me down. This is the same girl who lit my project book #9 on fire accidentally.

We have two weeks of class time left for this course. The third week is of course dedicated to the final written and bench exam. With July 4th being on a Friday this year and the campus closed, we’re (from what I understand) starting the final bench on Thursday the 3rd. I could be wrong, but that’s what I heard. Also, much of that previous week we’ll be getting to practice the exam so we can figure out how we want to do everything in ONE day. This week on Thursday we’ll have our 8th and final regular bench exam, which I saw a picture of. We get to pick on of three exams to do, but any way you go, there are two bezel set marquise stones. Refer to the heart pendant I did while back. But Monday we’re going to get to do lots of practice stone setting for the exam so we can refresh for it. I took Tuesday next week off to head in to night lab so I can get caught up and will probably be spending Tuesday evening rereading bezel set marquise information. From here on out it just seems like we’re being prepped for the ending. Which is cool. For all practical purposes, we’re done with projects, save for maybe one more. And since we’re the soon-to-graduate class, we have the showcase.

I hope you all are doing well, and I wish you the best of weeks. Start sending me some good vibes!
Until next week my friends, be well.