Marie Well this was not plain sailing. The measuring of the stone and silver strip needed for the bezel is fiddly but achievable. My first mistake was to put too much heat on the bezel strip when soldering. As a result some of it melted. I tried to rectify it by sanding but this was far too fiddly and ineffective. I then thought I might be able to melt it evenly…..erm no. As a result I ended up melting the base and the strip into one blob!
Take two was to use copper for the base as I had some left. I was careful this time to ensure the bezel strip didn’t get too hot and there was no unexpected melting. Once soldered on, I cut the base into a circle and filed.
I soldered this onto a ring I had previously made and all was still going well. The ring was cleaned up and put in the barrel polisher (best thing I’ve bought!). It came out shining but there was a dark ring on the copper. No idea why this happened but it meant lots more filing and hand polishing, and sore fingers!
The next step was putting in the stone. This went in fine but using the bezel pusher to mould the strip around the stone meant I marked all the copper. Need to be more delicate I think! I started filing and polishing again to remove all the marks but decided I actually liked all the marks so I added some more with a needle file and polished it up.
I’m pretty happy with the end result since it was my first go but I need to practise this a lot more!
