Optics for Jewelers

hi it's mentor jeweler Joel McFadden and I want to talk today about the different optics that you can use at the jeweler's bench so of course the bare minimum that you should use at a bench is safety glasses because with the rotary tools and the torches and everything you've got stuff flying up and you got to protect your eyes eyes and your fingers are the most important aspect of being in jewelry making jewelry so the next thing I recommend that people get is some little inexpensive reading glasses these are my wife's and these will protect your eyes but they'll also magnify what you're working on and you can buy these for a few dollars a convenience-store one of the things you want to look for is magnification and working distance one of the problems I do see with reading glasses is they have a very short working distance which means you've got to get really close to what you're working on so but if you look you'll see that they're typically 1.2 which means they're 1.2 times the magnification plus a working distance of five or six or seven inches now the standard in the jewelry industry for my entire lifetime has been the optivisor these are manufactured by a company in the United States and these things last forever and they're like the best one of the advantages of an optimizer is that it can sit on your head doesn't bother your face so you can wear a mask or you can wear prescription glasses if you have prescription glasses you can wear them under it and just push down and wear it with it and they're terrific but a couple things here I want to point out one is on the corner of the lens there's a number and the number is going to correspond with what that optivisor is magnification is op divisors come with six magnifications I'll post this in the bottom from 2 to 10 so I'm using a number 5 which is a focal length of 8 inches and a 2 1/2 times magnification and what that means is that the object appears to be two and a half times larger than looking at it with the naked eye so with the working distance with an optimizer they've been around a long time and that's why bench pins are sitting up bench pins on the work surface on most jeweler's benches it's high because this is right here the distance where everything is in focus for me and so that's why I would be working right here and it's not too stressful but you'll notice that my my neck is bent and I'm a little bit hunched up a lot I do sit really high in my chair a lot of people sit quite a bit lower like this and that's something you should consider is raising and lowering your chair another thing to note is I recently found out that if you buy an optimizer or optivisor is a branded name and there's a lot of knockoffs called a headband loops and things like that but you want to look for the blue lenses the blue lenses are ground glass and they have a few advantages one is they're crisper view but the other thing is is that they don't get damaged by sharp pieces of metal and things flying up in and getting in the thing so after the optivisor which I would by the way optivisor run about 48 to 50 dollars in the United States and I think they're really worth the money they'll last forever and one of my last thing is if you get a spare and you don't like the lens you can actually pop these lenses out and change them next up our binocular optics and there's two common types as the ob Rose which are not is easily available that's what these are as they were a few years ago and zeiss lenses and these run five hundred to six hundred dollars and they they sit on your eyes they do two-and-a-half magnification on average you can change them to increase or lower it so the object is going to look two and a half times the size as it would normally but what's great about these is that the working distance here is quite a bit higher so I can be a little further away from my working area and I get pretty good magnification it's it's a little bit better magnification then you have with your optivisor another great thing that we use these for a lot is when we're soldering we can solder our objects right here and we can see what we're doing with a pretty high magnification and what we look for when we're soldering is when does the solder itself flow and make sure that the metal isn't reticulating or turning glassy give it if your metal turns glassy that means it's getting really close to the melting temperature and with magnification you can see those things when you're setting stones if you have a fragile stone that maybe has a sharp corner or maybe an inclusion in it you want to know really when those prongs or whatever the bezel touches the stone and things are secure you don't want to be guessing and go by feel if you're setting little tiny diamonds diamond mailee or something like that really you want to be able to see how everything's going and the magnification is a big help and we use these a lot now the next step up is another advantage of these guys is that a lot of times when I go to gem shows like I'm getting ready to go to Tucson in a few weeks I'll take these with me because this will allow me to really see well what the stones look like how the faceting junctions are and all the details this really help a lot and if you want to look at jewelry at a Jewelry Show or something and see how well it's really made these helped a lot and you can put these in your pocket they're a little less cumbersome than wearing an optimizer I have seen people go to jewelry shows and walk around with their op divisors but I think that the Binaca lends us a little bit better than that hey I had to stop and help a customer with a necklace but so we're back we're going to talk about the creme de la creme of optics from the jewelry industry and that is microscopes so I picked up my magic microscope about 25 or 30 years ago it's a little dated a little worn out but wow what a difference in my setting I started Lee started loving doing fishtail and bead set and pave but what really inspired me because the microscope is gonna run you $2,000 or more but what really inspired me is we started cell setting in bezels a lot of fragile expensive stones like like some tanzanite sand some Perry but tourmaline 's and things like that and the stones are really really expensive and I thought it's worth it to see how well I'm setting the stone and how well it's doing for the $2,000 if you think about it if I save myself from damaging one $7000 stones as things paid for itself now there's a couple things about microscopes we talked about the optivisor as we talked about the binocular vision they give you two two-and-a-half reading glasses give you like a one and a half magnification the microscopes going to give you somewhere in the 10 to 30 time magnification and I'm gonna put a video example of what it's like to work under a microscope so that if that's something that you aspire to doing you'll have some idea when looking the probably the best selling microscope on the market right now is the like a 60 it's a fantastic scope so one of the first things I started doing was was the little pave work like this little guy right here you could see how tiny these little stones are but I remember when I was working with it for the first time under the microscope it looked like my little 52 round bottom graver was a backhoe removing metal and just you know when I and I thought it was okay but when I pulled that looked at it with a naked eye it was amazing when I looked at it at 2 2 times magnification with the optivisor it was still amazing and I you know when you're looking to see really clean nice and graving or tiny stone setting or setting expensive stones this is definitely the way to go the other advantage that I found however to the microscope for setting especially when I was doing a lot of setting was if you're using an optimizer you're gonna be sitting up here and you're gonna be hunched over working and you'll see that I'm holding my elbow up and my neck is slightly bent and I would get pinched nerves in here they were actually talking about using some vertebra in my neck but when I shifted to the microscope what I found is that I sit up to the bench and I work at this level now so that my back is straight my legs are straight and my head is just slightly tilted down the microscope is doing so much the work for me the big thing is now instead of my arm is being up my arms are down and that allows you to work in a more comfortable environment and to work a lot longer so it's a really great production tool this is a separate ring light that I have this is an option that you can put and these ring lights are great because they're non directional lighting you have your objective lens here and then you have your eye lens is here and these are all adjustable so when you do buy a microscope if you do decide to do do so make sure you get you speak with somebody that can give you the proper objective lens and the proper eyepiece lenses the eye lenses are going to determine the level of magnification that you have and the objective lens is going to determine the working area now what separates a bench microscope like a megi or a Leica from a stone grating microscope that you might have gotten from gie or somebody is those are designed to work right here and look at stones and these are designed to work right here usually when we work on this I'm using either of a ball vise or amusing this and you can see this is just really comfortable so I'll be inserting some details about the different levels of magnification some examples I've got some video that we through actually a Leica not this piece and you can see how much magnification there is there and if you don't mind please subscribe to my channel and that way you'll get notifications of all the new videos I come out with thank you so I made this little graphic so you can see at the top we have a ring I recently did with no magnification then the next one is reading glasses at a 1.5 magnification the next one is the optivisor that i use at a 2.5 magnification and then binocular glasses at a 2.75 magnification and then a microscope at a 20 power magnification [Music] so this is a piece of video that was provided to me by engraver calm that I work with and this is demonstrating the Leica microscope and the pulse Kramer this is a silver band that we're pave setting two millimeters around season and I think you can get a really good sense of how much magnification you get with the microscope and how much easier it is to work especially with these small or two millimeter stones and even smaller stones and one thing I forgot to add about the microscope is that it has the ability to change the power of magnification in the zoom level on the fly with just turning a knob and that is another advantage that has over all the other optics that have fixed magnification so thank you very much for watching and I hope this was helpful [Music] [Music]

Channel: Joel McFadden

Views: 4,742

Rating: 4.9807692 out of 5

Keywords: Jewelry, custom jeweler, rescue dogs, jeweler, jewelry designer, jewelry vlog

Id: WRO6LtQqqkY

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 25 2020