[Jewelry making - Article 00135] - Re: [Orchid] [How2] Platinum inlays

[Rex & Gabrielle Merten]

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    Dear Steve, thanks for your interest. If "chamfer" was
    electronically garbled to "campher", no wonder you were puzzled. 

    I originally wrote "chamfer" - at least that's what we call the
    small angled surface that's filed off a corner in Oz. I guess
    it's the equivalent of taking out that little ream of metal from
    the tube ends of a hinge before you rivet it, so's the rivet
    won't work free. Same with the inlay. Think of it as a funny
    shaped rivet, and you've got the idea. 

    You are quite right in your second question: the chamfer is
    applied to both sides of the host metal and widens the hole top
    and bottom. The inlay metal (in your case, platinum) being
    slightly thicker, is then able to be hammered and spread to fill
    the chamfered angle so that it presses firmly onto and slightly
    overlapping the host metal (your 14ct). No solder, just expanded
    tight. 

    Your question about finishing was a good one and I noticed a
    couple of recent posts on polishing platinum which covered the
    territory better than I could. 

    How do I finish and polish platinum? Perhaps it would be most
    useful if I answered this in context of finishing and polishing
    this particular type of inlaying. Because the platinum inlay is
    still a little raised above the surface of the 14ct, I file this
    down to the level of the host metal, being careful not to file so
    much away that I break through the filled chamfer. I do this with
    a fairly fine file, sometimes a hand-file, sometimes a needle
    file, depending on the size of the piece. 

    Because platinum is a "grabby" metal, tending to stick in the
    file teeth, I usually "pin" the file with a piece of chalk. A
    wipe or two with a piece of chalk reduces the tendency of
    platinum to stick in the teeth of the file. Now that it's
    satisfactorily filed, I emery with a 1200 grit emery paper. 

    Platinum is more difficult to polish - I don't have to tell you
    that. However there is a little trick that I have found useful in
    the prepolishing finishing stage. Even though I'm already using
    quite fine emery paper (1200 grit), I take a scrap of the same
    grit paper and rub it vigorously over the surface of my emery
    stick that I'm going to use to emery finish the platinum surface.
    In other words I rub emery against emery which gives me a much
    much smoother grit to emery the platinum with. 

    Now I'm ready to polish. The purists will probably throw up
    their hands in despair, but I simply use tripoli, then green
    rouge, then red rouge - just as I do for gold, and silver (and
    titanium for that matter). Getting the platinum down to the
    finest emeried finish I can seems to solve any problems of
    finish. 

    Another tip re inlay: If it's a relatively small inlay, I simply
    burnish it with a freshly polished needle (again, polished with
    tripoli, green rouge, red rouge) after emerying, before finally
    polishing with - you guessed it - tripoli, green rouge, red
    rouge. 

    Steve, I really respect what you guys know about technique and
    design. I hope I haven't oversimplified or too-obviously spelt
    out stuff that you may already know and do. Hope this helps. Let
    me know if I can clarify further, Regards, Rex from Oz. 

 


 

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