My life is tied up in teaching!\u00a0 I teach four – 3 hour classes a week at the Boca Museum Art School in Boca Raton, FL.\u00a0 One is a cabochon cutting class and three are metal fabrication classes.\u00a0 My favorite is an advanced fabrication class in which most students have been doing metal work for at least a year and some for 3 or more years.\u00a0 With 10 students in a class, they challange me in some way\u00a0every week!\u00a0 And I love the challanges because solving them ususally results in group discussions, multiple inputs, innovation, and in many cases, it takes me back to my earlier years of learning and development.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I have decided to begin a journal blog in which I will choose one or two of the more interesting problems – outlining the project, describing the challange and how we solved it.<\/p>\n
This week, the challange came from student A, who is from New York (my students come from all over the globe and parts of the U.S.) where she was a setter for many years.\u00a0 As is common in the trade, her speciality was quite narrow and she\u00a0never had an opportunity to open her horizons into other interesting disciplines.\u00a0\u00a0 She is a self starter, talanted and willing to do what is necessary to\u00a0learn new things. That is what we are going to do.<\/p>\n
A’s current project is a hollow ring of simple but unique design.\u00a0 She started with a shank of size and about 5mm wide of 20 ga silver.\u00a0 She added a larger\u00a022ga shaped ring of the same width\u00a0 with an undulating top, soldering them where they met at the bottom.\u00a0 This she covered on both sides with 20ga sheet so the whole ring is approx. 7mm\u00a0thick and the top has a\u00a0 wave effect sticking up about 4 to\u00a010 mm above the finger opening.\u00a0She drilled and soldered a 4mm IDx13mm tube widthwise through one\u00a0wave on the top into which\u00a0she will set two faceted amethysts.\u00a0 In a larger wave area she drilled and cold connected (flared) a 7mm ID\u00a0tube so the flare sticks out from the flat surface on each side about 1mm.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The challange<\/strong> was how to set a 6mm pearl into this tube so it seemingly floated!<\/strong>\u00a0 Her initial plan was to solder in a pin, bend it out 90 deg, set the pearl and bend it back in. I pointed out that the angle would prohibit the pearl from entering the tube\u00a0properly and would probably never fully seat itself onto the pin. It just wouldn’t look finished\u00a0even if she\u00a0could\u00a0get it into the tube.<\/p>\n I suggested instead, that she drill a\u00a01mm hole from the outside of the ring through the tube and countersink it to create a ‘shallow dish’.\u00a0 Then make a post with a small ball on it and cold connect it by\u00a0inserting the pearl into the tube and set the post through the hole into the pearl, securing it with epoxy.\u00a0\u00a0With a beading tool shape the\u00a0ball into the ‘dish’, file it flush to the surface so it will not show. This will hide the setting and the pearl will appear to ‘float’ in the tube.\u00a0 Hopefully I can post a picture of the finished product next week.<\/p>\n Check this blog for the next unique student challange of their ‘old’ teacher!!\u00a0 Cheers Don in SOFL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My life is tied up in teaching!\u00a0 I teach four – 3 hour classes a week at the Boca Museum Art School in Boca Raton, FL.\u00a0 One is a cabochon cutting class and three are metal fabrication classes.\u00a0 My favorite is an advanced fabrication class in which most students have been doing metal work for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/coralnut\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/coralnut\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/coralnut\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/coralnut\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/coralnut\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/coralnut\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/coralnut\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/coralnut\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/coralnut\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}