[Jewelry making - Article 00004] - [Orchid] Quick and Dirty Seamless Tubing

[guido]

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    Here is a little trick I came across trying to make seamless tubing
    for a gold bead necklace- 

    Prepare a symmetrical ingot (round, square, what have you) say, 1cm
    in diameter, and carefully drill a hole through the ingot's long
    axis (a drill press helps). Insert a brass wire or rod snugly
    through the hole, leaving enough to hang out of the ingot at both
    ends, and roll the assembly down in your rolling mill. Once  the
    ingot sandwich has been reduced to an appropriate diameter, you may
    solder one end tight and pull it through a draw plate to give it
    whatever profile you like. When you're done drawing, hammering,
    sectioning or texturing your tubing, etc, dissolve the brass core
    with an acid that won't harm your ingot material. Voila! Seamless
    tubing. It is important to drill the hole for the core precisely in
    order to produce uniform thickness of the walls of the tubing. 

    An experiment with a brass core and silver ingot suggest that
    whatever proportion of ingot diamter to core diameter you start with
    is roughly the same proportion you end up with in the finished
    tubing, however, this may not hold when there is a big difference
    between the physical properties of the core and ingot. I'm going to
    run a test with an iron wire core tomorrow to see if this can be
    used to control the size of the hole more easily. 

Cheers,
Guido

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