Jewelry School Part 1

This past week, August 1-5, I took a trip down the New Approach School in Virginia Beach to take a five day course entitled Bench jeweler Comprehensive. This course serves as a way to learn basic bench skills, jewelry repair, troubleshooting, and time saving techniques. I had practiced the craft of jewelry making on my own the last few years but even this was something I needed to do. I narrowed my search down after I had heard good things about the school and wanted to pursue a career in design and repair. Going down for the class turned out to be one of the best things I have ever done.

I flew down to Virginia Beach on the 31st and checked into my hotel. I was eating in the lobby when I saw a group of people who didn't look like they were here for a conference and it didn't seem like they were family either. They looked like they could have been jewelers here for the course so I tried to gauge their conversation. It turns out they were not, but the guy sitting a few booths away from me was and I sat down with him and talked for a little. Jordan ended up being my ride the next morning which was what I needed more than anything else at that time anyways.

Arriving at the school at 8am, which was a suite in a large building, I walked inside with some of the others who were also there to sharpen their bench skills. We were each instructed to find a bench and I took one next to Jordan because we were familiar with one another already. Our instructor, Blaine Lewis, explained the class a little and we began with a sawing exercise. I had done OK at sawing but up to that point I had done all right at everything I tried anyways. Blaine showed us a new way of holding the saw frame and how to make what we were doing more effective. This worked better than my technique, to say the least. We then tried something I had not even considered and failed usually failed at; turning the saw blade mid stroke to cut at either an angle or a curved line. I was wondering how this was possible to do without breaking the blade but was happy to find I could do it. This was not the first time I was to be surprised that week.

Next came filing the piece so that it was even. Everyone needed a little work so a demo on how to do it was shown. Blaine is truly a master and watching him 'take care of business' so to speak was astounding to watch. He manipulated the file so that the piece, which looked like a cutout of the Sphinx, cleaned up quickly. The class followed and things began to take shape.

After lunch we learned about how the torches worked. It was fairly easy to do because I had used on before, just not one that had oxygen. It was also smaller than my torch I usually used but I couldn't melt a lot metal with it. This was far easier than even I had hoped. What you did was to light the flame, propane, then open the oxygen valve to refine and add heat to the flame. Flame size and control are key when repairing jewelry. Although flame is 3,700F you have to be careful as to its size and how you move it to achieve the desired effect.

After getting the flame to the right size we took the ring we had already taken a piece out of, thanks to our saw blades, and soldered it shut. This was relatively easy and a beginner could do it just by following the tips presents. Sizing a ring up was where a little more technique came into play. We measured a piece out from another ring shank and cut it to size. Then we put the piece into the ring we were sizing up so that it was even. This may sound dull as heck but there were a few tricks, that I will not tell here, that made this easy to do. Sometimes people had trouble soldering their ring without the insert falling out; Blaine had a trick for that. Any problem you could possibly encounter that man had a solution for. Time flew by and with breaks, lunch and trying out new things the first eight hour day flew by. There was plenty more knowledge to come though.