remounted remounted remounts and nightmares

No. I did not meet any celebrities this week.

No update on the hideous Aztec Spaceship pendant either. Sorry.

No picture either because it hasn’t been graded or returned.

The good news is I snapped a few shots of the freeform migraine that I had to work on for the bench test. Story to follow!

This week was the longest short week ever. We had Monday off due to Memorial Day, so my school week was only four days. Which was nice, but we packed so much into those four days that we could have used that extra day. They do this every time we have a day off. Whoever writes the syllabus for school forgets to consult any calendar and never accounts for holidays so when we have one, they have to cram an extra day of stuff into the short week to keep us on track.
As long as I had that extra day off, I decided to head to downtown San Diego with my roommate and take a tour of the USS Midway (PRIDE of the Pacific!). The aircraft carrier was commissioned in 1945 and decommissioned in 1991 and has since been turned into a museum and is anchored in the harbor. Now, I spent four years in the Navy and worked small crafts the entire time. I never had the experience of being stationed on an actual ship, a part of my service I am completely okay with. So being able to take a tour and “see what I missed” was really cool. Let me tell you something…I was a Boatswains Mate and did my fair share of dirty work, but when I made it into the space on the ship where the BM’s dealt with the anchor chains of this massive ship and saw that the links were the size of tires, I silently thanked every high deity that I never had to mess with anything that size. I also have not stepped foot on non-skid (it’s a non slip surface that’s slapped on the decks of ships to help keep your footing) in roughly 9 years so walking on the ships stairs and decks coated in this stuff caused unnecessary flashbacks. I was also grateful that I never had to lay down nonskid on a flight deck that’s three football fields long. Amen. But what really killed me was touring around the main deck just below the flight deck and noticing where the lifejackets were located. And then I remembered that not much in the military makes sense. And it made me laugh.

So here’s my roommate trying to reach them.

I could write an entire blog on my experience on that ship, but I wont. So in lieu of that, here’s a picture of me on the flight deck!

Back to business. So Tuesday we jumped right into KiKi’s Mothers ring. It was a five stoner. We were given a day and a half to set five ovals in a mothers ring, then size it up then retip three prongs. I didn’t think that this ring was going to be too hard at first, but we’re talking about 20 total prongs in very close proximity to each other, and the settings for the ovals were a bit different. It was pretty difficult to get the seats cut the same and set the stones because of this. I got four of the five set well, and the fifth, which was the “peridot”, made that thunderous “clicksnap” sound as I brought the (tight) prong down. which indicated to me that one of three things happened:

1) one of my knuckles popped

2) someone snapped their fingers

3) my stone cracked.

You pick.

So mid-Wednesday when absolutely none of us were done with KiKi, we shoved forward to Lars Larson, which is an “enhancer” for say, a large pearl necklace. SO we sat through the lecture and demo for that one, and the second he got done we all chucked Lars aside in favor of finishing Kiki WHY? Because our 6th Bench exam is the next day and it’s a one day exam and no one wanted to be behind in the event that the exam rolled over in to Friday.

Kiki: done.

Thursday we had the 6th bench and were greeted at the door by a mischievously smiling Don who simple wished us well and set out the job box. Inside those exam bags we found that damn freeform remount, three new heads and three new stones. The instructions for the exam were fairly similar to the original project we did with this ring, the only difference was that we had to take this down to a 5 from 7 ¼ on a ring that was previously half-shanked. So we had to make a cut on the side of the ring on one of the solder seams and size it there. We also had to pull the three existing stones and heads out and replace then with the new ones. Getting the heads and stones out was no problem. Three seconds. But the clean up I had to do prior to soldering the new heads in was an event that took me most of the morning. My idea was to get the ring back to its original look and THEN get everything soldered in to avoid lots of cleanup. Which, while labor intensive and made me feel like I was dragging behind everyone, turned out to be the best move I could have made. While everyone was slamming the new heads in on top of old solder and whatnot, I sanded and polished. So while they were trying to get tool marks out of hard to reach areas AFTER the soldered their heads in, I was doing nothing more than using some tripoli to clean up. Yay! So I avoided disaster to some degree. Around 2 p.m. I started sweating bullets because we only had one hour left and I was still cutting prongs. So was my 16 year old prodigy classmate, who was the one that kindly pointed the clock out to me. So we both shot each other that look you give someone in panic, turned up the volume on our respective MP3’s and proceeded to haul ass. In one hour I managed to get all of the seats cut, and stones set. Awesome. However, I did not get the prongs styled or a final polish. And I though I was going to get a finger wagging from Don for not finishing until I saw that exactly one person finished the exam in one day. The other 14 of us were allowed to complete the exam on Friday morning. I’m proud to announce that I only needed an extra half hour on Friday to style and do a final polish. Which made me the 3rd person done with the exam. Which I’m fine with.

Friday after I got done with my exam I started in on the fabrication of the Lars pendant. I was in the process of soldering assorted microscopic parts together when I heard the very loud “PANG-CLANG-Clunk” of someone’s project getting ripped from their hands and thrown mercilessly into the back of the rouge machine. Which I have stated before is one of the most sickening sounds you could ever hear. What this does to the entire class is causes us to stop what we’re doing and look up in horror and wait with mild panic to see if whoever is polishing is going to start crying or give us the thumbs up that their project survived. Much to my sadness I looked up to see my 16 year old friend at the machine doing a final rouge before turning in her bench exam.

Here’s what I saw in one minute flat:
1) turns off machine.
2)picks up ring tentatively
3) reviews potential damage
4) places ring off to the side
5) stabilizes herself with both hands
6) dips head in defeat
7) takes deep inhale/exhale
8) picks up ring
9) turns around slowly
10) looks directly at me and with the biggest blink-blink baby deer eyes I’ve ever seen shakes her head side to side and hold up the ring. I think her lip quivered. Or maybe that was me because I had that sick feeling in my stomach?
11) brings the ring to ME! Drops it on my desk to look at and leaves the room to walk it off.

Here’s the wreckage:

Luckily, only the shank was mutilated. The stones survived and Don felt so bad for her that he straightened her shank out the best he could for her while she was out walking off steam. Unfortunately the shank cracked at one of the seams so she had to resolder it back together and try to clean it up. I felt so horrible for her. But she got it done. And that’s what matters. But it’s one of those things that reminds you that nothing is “done” until its in the bag and back in the job box.

But I did get a picture of mine right before I turned it in. For your viewing pleasure, I give you Gigi’s freeform remounted remount headache inducing bench exam #6: So none of us are done with Lars obviously, but that’s not stopping Don from launching into another project on Monday. Game on! Intensity: check. Sanity: check.

In other news I am the proud mother of a brand spanking new Bodum double walled borosilicate glass French press. I’ve always wanted one, but decided that the one I wanted was too expensive. So when the opportunity to get the one I wanted at a ridiculous ridiculous discount at my job came up, I ran with it. All I’m going to say is I got a $100 press for about $24. And I love love love it. Thanks for sharing this moment with me.

Until next week my friends, be well.