Soldering and saving

 I was so inspired by our most recent workshop with Lindsey Gallagher jeweller, in Thurso, that I hankered to keep on soldering.

So after getting most of the travel fuzz from our heads, and gathering a few bibs and bobs, I joined Barry in his workshop shed to have another go at soldering.

Starting once again with soldering jump rings - I needed practice and I got lots of it.

I started with 6 small and 6 medium sized O-rings.

Ready to start soldering.

I managed to solder 6 circular O rings, (with great difficulty and much repeating of effort) but I wanted them more lozenge shaped, so I squeezed them a bit.

And then I flattened them in the rolling mill a bit. 

You can see that the soldering was not what you might call consistent!

So I practiced some more, trying to now join the lozenges into a single piece.

And kind of sort of managed it.

Until I didn't it! Here they are after quenching and pickling. One join was clearly too fragile to handle being transferred between bowls and the like. So, I just have to go back and solder some more - but that was enough for today.

Still plenty of cleaning and polishing to do, but it was a solid practice session and I felt like I got back into some kind of groove with it.

Meanwhile as I was going back and forward, round and round, Barry was saving my bacon elsewhere. 

I was really pleased with how some of my Grief is a Stone metal calligraphy and rocks worked out. But I had noticed what I thought might be some corrosion on the lettering, which made me a bit sad and rather uncertain that I could ever sell the work anywhere.

Barry had a look at it for me and came up with a sensible explanation. He suggested that when we had taken the protective coating off the front and back of the words, some stickiness from the tape remained on the metal.

He then figured that some dust from cutting the stones had adhered to this residual stickiness and left this raised discolouration. And of course, he had a plan for rectification. 

So with me tucked away in my corner doing soldering homework, Barry cleaned, tidied and buffed the words back to beautiful. What a marvellous rescue!

Given that we won't be cutting any more stones or rocks for this work in the near future, I think I can safely say job done! With grateful thanks to B for his wizardry.