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Tweezers are a constant in
a jeweler's life, particularly in these safety conscious times. Tweezer
use can help reduce your contact with nasty dermatitis causing chemicals.
For example, when used for handling objects in solutions such as pickle,
soap, and cleansers, tweezers limit potential damage to your skin.
Tweezers are also one of the more easily adaptable tools at the bench.
For example, they can be altered to hold together stone setting components,
or heads and rings, while soldering. Here are a few of my favorite tweezers
and modifications:
Normal hand-held tweezers for soldering are most useful if they consist of
8 inches of good, solid metal. My favorite pair are stainless steel bench
tweezers from Germany. It might be noted that the Indian style soldering
tweezeris excellent; it has a heavy, thick end to grip during use so your
fingers don't get hot.
One of my favorite tweezer tricks is done using a wide-jawed self-locking
tweezer-the type that is normally chrome plated. You can alter this tool
to pick up earring posts from a flat surface at a 90o angle. There is
no skill required to snap the posts into place in the tweezer jaws, making
production soldering of earrings much faster and more efficient.
To create this tool, open the ends of the tweezers and file a groove
into each side of the jaw with a triangular needle file. Start close to
the end of the tweezer. The grooves must be in the same location on both
sides so they line up with each other. Also, the grooves should not be
too deep-no more than 0.5 mm, and even that is probably a bit too deep.
Once the grooves are made, file the outside of the jaws. Form a beveled
front end that slopes down toward the very top edge of the grooves. With
the ends filed at such an angle, they can smoothly grasp an earring post
lying on a flat surface and guide it into the groove in the tweezer ends.
You can then use the post to pick up a solder chip, melt the solder onto
the post, and solder it to the earring back.
Numerous grooves, slots, and holes can be made in tweezers to hold various
assemblies together while soldering. If the tweezers are made of titanium,
or if titanium ends are attached to self-locking tweezers, they cannot
be soldered onto the piece you are working on, and thus make a superb
soldering jig. (Note: If you are working with platinum, use tungsten welding
rods to make tweezer ends, as other metals can contaminate platinum at
high temperatures.)
To use these types of tweezers as soldering jigs, position them on a
large, strong magnet on your soldering bench: Just clamp the backs of
the tweezers to the magnet at a useful angle.
I found the perfect magnet for this purpose inside an old stereo speaker
unit. Just drill out the mounting spots attaching the magnet to the frame
(while wearing safety equipment), and you have a great platform for your
tweezers.
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