Holding your work

hi it's Joel McFadden with another quick tip from the bench they were going to talk about holding your work [Music] and we're gonna start with the most common piece which is a ring holder and it's wooden and you have a little wedge and the bottom and you know this is what we've all started with and it's the most simple and basic system but I it has a major flaw we're gonna talk about that a lot of times we used to go and take our bench pins and put a nice V in it so that this would sit right here it's pretty easy to file pretty easy to use pliers on it so if you're sending or not you know doing prong saenctum this is a fine tool but it has a great weakness and most professional jewelers today do not use these anymore in fact I kind of joke around that I'm more likely to use this ring holder to prop the door open than anything else so what is the flaw with this one cool the flaw is okay I want to do a bezel setting so I'm gonna put my bezel setting ring in here and now I want to tap on it it's kind of kind of awkward it's pretty hard to do so most professional jewelers now have an array of tools like these that they use and these tools hold the work for you and essentially relieve your extra hand so now you've got two hands but I thought I would take this opportunity to review the different tools and talk about which ones have what values so one of the most common ones it's been out for quite some time now that a lot of people use is the benchmate and here's a bench mate and basically it's very similar to a ring holder that you drop the ring in here and then you clamp it down and if you check my other tip I can show you about the bridge but clearly the advantage here is now I have two hands to work with so if I'm filing I can use my thumbnail as a safe or if I'm tapping I can hold my punch in my piece at the same time so you can see the tremendous advantage to that another tool that's really really popular these days is the engraver ball and this is a full-size engraver ball that I've had for a long time and they will hold all sorts of work big work small work I have a little ring vise in here now that it works by sliding the ring on here and then clamping it down I guess the ring that was on there was a lot bigger than that so so this works pretty good it gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility and of course again you have your two hands-free but I actually these are heavy and they're made for hand engraving and they're not always perfect for this so my favorite these days and the ones that I've used the most are the really great micro balls and this is a particular one as a sign set ball but these are just great tools because it's so flexible you can mount a ring in here you can do you know whatever you need to do whether it's a practice plate or in a grading plate or a watch or a ring and it's not as big and cumbersome a lot of times you know you can move it around it's a great tool and if you're looking to step up from your your bench your ring holder I suggest looking at 20s micro balls now I'm gonna give you a little side tip here one of the things that we use a lot is we call I call it thermoplastic but it's actually jet set or a soft plastic you set this stuff when it's when it's hard it's really rock hard but you just put it in boiling water and it softens up and I'm gonna show you how that works in just a second so I've heated up my jet set and when you get it you want to grab it out of your water it's basically this is boiling water or just below boiling you put it in here and it gets soft and you can manipulate it into whatever shape you want so typically what we'll do is we'll wrap it around a ring and the reason we want to do this is to protect the ring from the vise here or if you just want to hold something that's really tough to hold so I already did one here's the one I already hearted hardened and what you do is you set it down and just let it chill or you put it in the vise and you let it chill and III do in fact mean chill down and when it gets soft the jet-set is pretty hard like really hard now there's several different types of jet-set and the clear jet set is a lot harder but this way I can put my piece in the vise it can't get marred by the sharp edges and it's extremely secure once I've set my stone all I have to do is take it out put it back in the hot water give it about three to five minutes and it will peel right off and there'll be no marks or anything and I find that this is one of the greatest inventions in the jewelry industry it just there's so many things you can do with this jet set and anyway so there's my review of tools you know my favorite is little inset microvolt ball vise and then I use my bench make quite a lot but if you're going to go buy one you know my suggestion is get one of these minis because there are the most flexible can be used for a lot more things so that's your tip for the day and remember subscribe

Channel: Joel McFadden

Views: 6,864

Rating: 4.966527 out of 5

Keywords: Jewelry, custom jeweler, rescue dogs, jeweler, jewelry designer, jewelry vlog, learn to make jewelry at home, learn to make jewelry, learn to make jewelry near me, learn to set stones

Id: im-sDEC9luQ

Length: 6min 16sec (376 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 10 2019