Rio’s Catalog in Motion – Day Two! - Tucson Gem Show

It is the second day of our class – Using Your Hydraulic Press! It was great…we got to use their new bracelet forming tools. As you can see there is a former for the body of the bracelet and a smaller one that bends the ends. The system works to shape bracelets that have an overlay, a texture, a pattern…without flattening out the

details or causing any separation.

If you are familiar with Bonny Doon’s current system – it is an aluminum ring. The waste in carving them was huge so – in an effort to produce a “greener” product they are still producing a “ring” style bracelet former (in Delrin), but the new cuff formers above are their future trend.

This is the Anticlastic Former set – you have a former for the body of the bracelet and a former for the ends.

…and the Synclastic Former Set.

As you can see from the example – you can form an overlay piece without seperation – in fact, in the Rio Catalog is a picture of a bracelet that was formed with the stones already set in it.

This is a little off-topic…but – was I the only person that didn’t know that Rio had patterned copper? It is really nice – one looks like it was run through a micro-fold brake and one looks like a ball peen hammer pattern and the third is a more intense pattern.

This is what we learned in class today these are all copper…

From left: Rio’s new textured copper (20 ga. – I think) that was annealed prior to forming with the new synclastic formers; this is the same copper in the anticlastic solid ring former. The two center pieces were corrugated first and then pressed and you can see that they retained their pattern. The two on the right are just formed annealed copper – one narrow, one wide.

This is red brass, Dave calls it “Bonny Donnite” as they use a lot of it for demos. I annealed these pieces prior to forming. You can see the wide anticlastic on the left was done with the new former – the one above was done with the new Delrin “ring –style” former. I personally feel that the ring did a better job of shaping. The one on the right is the annealed red brass and when I was annealing the middle one I notice that it goes a solid black so I decided to scratch a pattern into it. Sorry about the repeat of my copper washer bracelet…

The end of the day Dave Reynolds showed us how to do a “deep draw” on the Bonny Doon. What does that mean you ask? He took a disk of copper formed a vessel/cup. If you look carefully just above the black tube you can see the copper.

I have to give a quick thanks to Kyle – our Rio slave ….just joking! You couldn’t ask this guy to do something he wasn’t willing to do! He prepped, cleaned, ran between the class and management with our questions and met us each day with a smile!