While waiting until Labor Day weekend was over so that I could access the public library’s laser printer for creating etching patterns on some PNP-Blue resist sheet, I had been giving some thought to creating findings.
The one finding I needed most was earring wire. And after surfing exhaustively I did not see any fine silver wire made for earring wire or posts which wouldn’t cost at least as much to ship as to buy.
Since I didn’t have either a lathe or a rolling mill handy, today I farted around with some scrap silver and with my existing equipment to see how just how well I could make do.
I had a flex-shaft (a Sears Craftsman) left over from my first marriage, it being one of the few gifts from my ex which I chose to keep which gave me more joy than heartache to own.
I used my current tool of choice, a Dremel 400, and a fibre cut-off wheel (diamond had not worked very well here) to cut a sliver of silver off from one of my fine silver trade tokens (a round one this time, which I had chosen to destroy just to get the feel of tools on the substance).
I cut the sliver deliberately to fit the 1/8 collet of the flex-shaft. I then mounted the business end of the flex-shaft sideways in a vise, lathe-style.
I then tried using various types of grinders to lathe the silver sliver down into something round. I tried a diamond burr, a diamond cutoff wheel, a spare carbide fly cutter, and a chainsaw grinding stone, all held by a pair of pliers. None of them really worked well, seeing as how they made grooves in the result, but the diamond burr worked fastest for shaping the semi-rectangular sliver into something cylinder-like.
I’ll look more into this: but I’m halfway tempted to creat a F’only Lathe. There are lots of pawnshops selling cordless drills so I can get a chuck from one or more of them as a starting point.
(NOTE: If I bought 2 identical used cordless drills and ran one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, I’d have a symmetrical power headstock and tailstock. Worth looking into!)
A crudely lathed silver of silver, sawn off from a fine silver trade token coin. Note grooves resulting from crude attempts to apply grinding tools.
On a different note, my family watched during suppertime a really NICE rainbow.
Left hand side of dinner time rainbow
Right hand side of dinnertime rainbow.
And THEN came the severe thunderstorm WITH NICKEL SIZED HAIL!!!
Needless to say.. the shed was down for the night.
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Recently a friend of mine was working on a ring he’d made on a mini lathe and it needed to be taken down. It wasn’t perfectly round, since he had hand fabricated it, so after one or two passes he realized it wouldn’t come out even if he kept it up. His solution was to run the lathe relatively slowly, and hand file then sand the ring to shape and finish instead of using standard cutting tools. It came out quite well, and the opposite side over and undercutting was minimal.