I can only speak for myself but I love tools. I am sure most people who are reading this are of the same mind. When I first started learning to become a goldsmith I would look at catalogs of tools and think, “Wow when I get one of those I can learn to pave or hand engrave.”<\/p>\n
I would spend my whole paycheck on tools every week – forget food forget bills, I wanted tools and heck I had friends in the food business they would feed me. I remember buying my first flexshaft then immediately lusting after a quick change hand piece. I was committed to becoming a goldsmith when I bought my first rolling mill. I still have it -the biggest cavallin they made, darn near starved to death to get it. That baby was 1,000 bucks 18 years ago. New tools are nice but as I have gotten older I see the beauty in tools owned by others. That is soundin’ pretty sappy, but let me explain.<\/p>\n
I got a butt load of gravers from a retired hand engraver. He had used those tools his whole life and they were sharpened and ground perfectly. I have made my own gravers but none worked as well as Nick’s. It was like being given a fifty year head start. I also have Nick’s lathe – a small chrome jewelers lathe. He engraved his name on it right by the headstock, maybe I will engrave my name on it someday.\u00a0 Some of you may have seen my video that I made of my shop in the earlier blog. I have a lot of machines, they are all pretty old. The newest is from 1957. I sorta have a retirement home for obsolete machinery. Today’s culture seems to thrive on youth but I will choose wisdom any day. I like all the marks and wear spots on my old machines, my mill has this black stain on the corner of the table. I could never figure out how it got their until last summer when I was using it and a drop of sweat landed right in that spot and then it became clear how that got there. All the people who have run this thing since the 40’s have been sweating on it in the same place. My lathe which has WWII service tags on it has a smooth spot warn into the head stock from everyone leaning on it while they run the machine. Imagine how many people have run that thing in the past decades.<\/p>\n
About ten years ago while I was at work a gold locket came in it was hand made in 18k rose\u00a0gold with mine cut diamonds and seed pearls. The instructions were to grind the engraving off the back of the locket. The engraving read, “From Henry to Mary August 7, 1877. ” It was all done by hand beautifully. After drooling over it for a few minutes I thought no. Then Hell no, I will not grind the engraving off of this, these people can kiss my harry goldsmith butt. I went up and told them that I would buy it before I ground that off. Well that was easy, they sold it to me and used the money to buy a shiny new one that was stamped out by the millions in china but did not say from Henry to Mary August 7, 1877.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I can only speak for myself but I love tools. I am sure most people who are reading this are of the same mind. When I first started learning to become a goldsmith I would look at catalogs of tools and think, “Wow when I get one of those I can learn to pave or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}