[Jewelry making - Article 00546] - Re: [Orchid] Soldering and Sea Glass

[Lee Einer]

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    The assignment is to attach a sterling silver strip with two jump
    rings around the "waist" of an hourglass -shaped piece of beach
    glass. The challenging aspect is that, once on the beach glass, no
    soldering can be done. 

    I can see a few straightforward solutions. It's time for cold
    connections. 

    One approach would be to solder jump rings onto a strip of sterling
    of a heavy enough gauge that soldering would not be necessary. The
    challenge would be to conform it to the middle of the beach glass
    without stressing the glass to the point of breakage. If you are
    careful, though, it should be doable. 

    An alternative would be to use a thinner gauge strip of sterling,
    and fasten it with one or more rivets. Bend the strip around the
    stone, and then drill one or more holes through the top of the
    overlap and slightly into the bottom strip. Remove the strip, and
    solder wire of the same diameter as the drill hole at each of the
    marks on the bottom strip (and solder on your jump rings.)
    Reassemble around the stone, feed the wires through the top, and
    either treat them as rivets (easy does it, though, so you don't
    damage the glass) or just bend them over to lock the strip. You
    could even use a contrasting metal for the wire, if your customer is
    amenable to that. 

    Yet another option would be to use heavy round wire (like maybe 14
    gauge.) Cut the wire 3/4 inch longer than necessary to girdle the
    sea glass. Ball both ends of the wire with your torch. Bend
    approximately to shape so you can see where to attach the jump
    rings, and solder them on. Bend a loop in one end of the wire big
    enough to accomodate the other end of the wire. Fit it to the beach
    glass, put the other end of the wire through the loop, and bend it
    back on itself to hold the wire in place. With this approach, as an
    alternative to soldering jump rings, you could bend a couple of
    additional loops in the wire at the appropriate points. There are
    variations on this solution- for example, you could just bend the
    balled ends of both wires up at a 90 degree angle,  drop a jump
    ring, bent as for loop-in-loop chain, over them, and crimp the jump
    ring to lock it in place. 

    The fun part of this is that you can take what is presented as a
    technical problem, and make it an excuse for all sorts of quirky
    design elements. 

    Of course, as a last resort, there is the chemical cold connection,
    AKA epoxy ;-) 

HTH,
Lee Einer
Dos Manos Jewelry
http://www.dosmanosjewelry.com


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