[Jewelry making - Article 00905] - Re: [Orchid] Cutting jump rings

[Trevor F]

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    Charles' recent article in the Ganoksin Tips (#106) make me think
    that a recent discovery of mine on this subject might be of general
    interest. 

    My needs were to make a number of teeny little jump rings from .75 mm
    wire with an inner diameter on the rings of 1 mm. In a case like this
    wrapping with tape and such just gums things up and obscures the work
    so I needed a different approach. 

    Extrapolating from recent suggestions in this thread here's what I
    did: 

    - take a piece of brass riveting wire 1 mm dia., 6 inches long. 

    - cut the wire in half and you've got two pieces about 3 inches long
    each. 

    - chuck up 1/2 of the wire in a power drill and "turn" in down a bit
    with a standard bastard file. It helps to lay the wire flat against
    your bench or benchpin or whatever while your do this in order to
    support the wire. After about 20 seconds of flat-filing the wire at a
    modest rpm the wire was about .94 mm dia. 

    - with the turned wire still in the drill, wind up a coil of the
    (annealed).75 mm wire.  I did this by bending a small dog-leg in the
    wire and slipping that between the drill's jaws in order to secure the
    wire for coiling. 

    - slide the new coil off the turned wire and then onto the un-turned
    1/2 of the riveting wire. The point is that the coil made on the .94
    mm turned "mandrel" will be held quite snugly on the un-turned
    portion. Wiggle the coil down to one end of the wire so that the
    dogleg you made earlier is furthest from the end of the mandrel. This
    dogleg is going to be pretty handy while you're sawing off your rings
    so you want it to be on the last ring of the coil that you're going
    to saw through. 

    - if you are having trouble moving the coil on the un-turned mandrel
    try rotating it counter to the coil's twist direction, as if you
    might want to uncoil it. This will temporarily give you a bit of slack
    and the coil will be easier to move. 

    - chuck the 1 mm wire + coil into a pin vise and then gently clamp
    that into your bench vise (copper jaws on the bench vise will be
    kinder on your pinvise than the standard steel jaws). 

    - here's the dogleg trick: while you're cutting at least the first
    2/3 or 3/4 of the coil you can use the dogleg to tighten up the coil.
     Gently apply a little pressure on the dogleg with the thumb of your
    off-saw hand and you'll see that it snugs down quite nicely and your
    sawing should be a little easier. 

    - fwiw, I used a #8/0 blade in order to get a nice fine, clean cut
    that needed no further dressing before soldering up. 

    My thought was that this turned/un-turned mandrel trick would be
    generally applicable to any small sized jump ring making process. 
    I've since used it for 1.5 mm inner dia jump rings made of 1 mm wire
    and the process was equally successful. 

Cheers,
Trevor F

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