Cinnamon Jewellery

A few months ago I started having a strange problem. The solder joins on some of my 2mm bronze wire bangles started to split as I was making them. Three out of five of a set I was making split and I had to start them again.  Bearing in mind I sell a lot of bangles and have made hundreds of them without any solder join problems occuring before I was baffled. I also had a few solder join splitting occurances with 3mm bronze wire and 2mm copper wire. One of the joins on the 2mm bronze wire came open literally as I got the bangle out of the pickle pot and others would start to split when I put pressure on the join either by rounding the bangle on the mandrel or by hammering it on the mandrel. I thought about what I was doing differently..... but I wasn't doing anything differently from how I made all my other bangles! I use wire ranging from 1.8mm up to 5mm in copper, bronze and sterling silver. The process is the same - cut the wire, file the ends flat using a mitre jig, b...

Up to now I've always regarded the wire grooves on my rolling mill as slightly annoying as they take up space on the rollers that I wish was smooth. Then I'd be able to texture wider sheets of metal instead of the measly 4cm I can do now. I've never had any inclination to make my own wire so the grooves are those things that are just "there". That's up til now! I've known for a while you can make square shaped wire using the grooves so thought I'd have a go. I have searched for square copper and bronze wire in the past and only managed to find the thinner gauges in the UK. Being able to make my own in thicker gauges is a real bonus.  I just need to apologise now for the blurry photos. For some reason I decided not to brace my arm/hand on anything when I took most of the photos..... If you move the two rollers close together on the mill you can see the diamond shape gap the  grooves leave. I annealed some bronze wire and fed it...

I wrote a post recently about forming soldering clamps from the Knew Concepts titanium strips I ordered sometime last year. One of the most useful clamps I made was a shape that would help me to solder earring posts onto stud and open hoop earrings... I can position it to hold the post like this for studs.... And like this for soldering posts onto open hoop style earrings.... Previously I was holding the piece of 20g post wire with a pair of tweezers in my right hand and the hoop was held in place using reverse action tweezers in a third hand as it is above. I would hold the torch in my left hand and as the flux heated up and became liquid I would find the post wire would start to move and I'd be forever stopping and trying to get it back in position. The metal for the hoops is only just over 1mm thick in some cases so that also used to make it a bit tricky and swearing would occur quite regularly! Now that I can set it up with the titanium clamp hol...

So having ordered five of the Knew Concepts titanium strips about a year ago {!} I thought it was time I actually did something with them. I've heard great things about how useful they are as soldering aids so why it's taken me so long to get round to it who knows. I think I was worried they would be hard work to bend, saw and shape being titanium and to some extent they are but not beyond most peoples' ability. Warning! This post contains lots of photos. And the tri-colour ink on my printer was running out which is why the print out looks as though it's had a sepia filter added to it :D My camera also developed the white screen of death half way through {and is currently away being repaired} so I had to change to my tablet to carry on with the photographing. I decided to start with the easiest looking "clamp". This one........ I marked two points on the strip where I was going to bend it and using an old pair of flat nose pliers I made my ...