Transcript
Courtney Gray: Welcome to Creative Side Jewelry Academy of Austin, online at creativeside.org. I’m Courtney Gray. I started my school here, Creative Side Jewelry Academy, four years ago. I’m here in Austin, and I’m going to tell you about jewelry making today.
Jewelry Making: Essential Jewelry Tools
I’m going to show you some essential tools that you are going to need for jewelry making. Most of these tools, you are going to use in the fabrication process and they will be used to work directly with the metal, directly with sheet, wire, tubing. Rio Grand in Albuquerque New Mexico is a great resource.
This is one of the kits that Rio Grande offers, and it comes with a number of tools that are really essential to the jewelry making trade. You’ve got some nips, you’ve got your pliers, and you’ve got flat nose, round nose. Three major hammers that you are going to need. A rawhide, a plastic mallet, a chasing hammer for hitting steel tools and chasing reposé work.
You have a bench pin for working your material on. This comes with a table clamp that you can actually clamp right on to your table. Any work surface will work with this. This is what is nice about it. You can clamp it right on to any table. It might mark up your wood. So, put any something in between maybe to protect it. This comes with a ring clamp, so you can actually clamp your jewelry in here and work it with your files. This is a great tool!
We also have a pin vice for holding other small tools, prongs and things like that when you are setting. Bur Life, so, when you get your flex shaft working down the road you can use these to lubricate your burs. This also comes with a ring mandrel. Basically you use it to hammer material around then you can size rings up.
You have tweezers here. Different things to hold small objects with. Especially when you get into soldering, these things are really essential.
We also have some measuring tools that are included in this kit. Some dividers, a caliper gauge, the millimeter gauge that you are going to need for measuring things. Ring sizing, if you are making something for someone, you need to get a proper ring size. You are going to need that tool as well. And you have some bezel pushers here so that when you get into stone setting you can use these.
And of course Tim McCreight’s Complete Metalsmith, which is an excellent book. We recommend this to all of our students here at Creative Side. And you can learn quite a little bit from just that handbook.
