In an effort to practice without breaking the bank, I asked friends if they'd be willing to pay for rings made to size, in the style of the 7th century Frankish ring I documented here a few weeks ago. Several people were down for it, so cool beans, right? Well, sort of. I wanted practice, and I got it! And I've learned some things along the way.
1. Cutting out and forming all the bezel components? Easy. Fast. Great to do as a batch. I did learn that cutting down the bezel wire width-wise is an uncompromising hell that's not worth the time and effort. It works, but it's not nice, so I ordered bezel wire in the proper width.
2. It's really, really easy to melt bezel wire. It just is. Especially when using hard solder. If everything is not perfectly clean and fluxed, the solder doesn't melt properly, you keep the heat on just a little too long trying to coax it, and the next thing you know, your bezel is fused, but also half melted. And the solder still hasn't flowed.
3. Batch soldering all the bezels onto a single back plate: nice idea in theory, in practice, my torch wasn't up to the task. The solder either refused to flow altogether, or else it melted and flowed sluggishly. Turns out, the large back plate, sitting on a stainless steel screen up on a tripod, was a terrific heat sink. The first rule of soldering is that the pieces you're joining have to fully reach the melting temperature of the solder. The butane micro torch just didn't have the juice to heat all of, or enough of, that back plate all at once. The individual pieces were mostly salvageable, and I ended up with a LOT of tiny pieces of solder in my pickle pot.
4. Soldering three components onto one back plate at a time doesn't always work on the first go. After I got the back plate cut down into individual back plates, and set everything up to re-solder, I found that the outermost rings on half of the bezels weren't firmly secured. The other half were fine, though. So I had to re-solder the ones that weren't up to snuff. Not the worst thing, by far.
5. However, oh yes, number 4 gets worse. Because in the process of re-soldering, I didn't realize that my torch was almost empty of fuel. When the fuel gets low, the flame doesn't get as hot. So I struggled to get the solder to melt and flow. I got it eventually, but I ended up overheating two pieces. They didn't melt, but they've got some fire scale I need to try and get off. That would be much easier if it was a smooth bezel, but with the beaded wire, I'm going to have to see what I can accomplish with a dremel, a nylon brush head, and some tripoli polishing compound.
All the bezels are now complete, filed, and ready to be polished and attached to shanks. I still had one that needed to be re-soldered after the outer ring came loose in filing. But they're at a good point now, and I've only lost two throughout all this. It's all part of the learning process!
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