PB Cohen Creations

A few days ago I asked the internets for advice on drawing a bead on a wire, and struck up a conversation with Maxine. Thanks, Maxine! It worked! Since I was having such a hard time with this, I figured the success story deserved a blog entry of its own.

Here's the problem: one of my Monster Rings.

The "head" is a bead created via hollow form construction, which is then soldered onto a ring shank. The "arms" are made from 16 gauge fine silver wire, with a bead drawn at each end. I was having a really hard time getting the "arms" as short as I wanted them. Part of the trick is knowing how short to cut the wire before drawing that second bead, but I was really afraid my torch (acetylene and air) simply wasn't getting hot enough — and that the "head" was acting as a heat sink as the drawn bead got closer to it.

Maxine's suggestion that the material I was using to keep the solder from re-flowing during the procedure might also act as a heat shield gave me some much-needed confidence. See, once I made the mistake of using such a large torch tip that the whole "head" got heated up, and since I stupidly didn't have anything on the solder joins, the ring completely fell apart! Despite the fact that I've practically dunked the whole ring in "Liquid Paper" ever since, I was still afraid of destroying another ring, and — coincidentally? — never quite managed to get those "arms" short enough.

But last Saturday, with five rings to do, I was determined to get it right. It's been awhile since I've used yellow ochre powder mixed with water to paint solder seams (it's a little slow to dry), so I'm sure there are tricks to using that that would be helpful. But one notable thing about "Liquid Paper" and "Wite-Out" is that they burn. This gave me a reasonable indication of how hot things were getting. First the correction fluid gets completely dry, then it catches fire, then it goes all gray — and actually, I've never heated anything up enough to know what happens when the correction fluid fails. Or if it fails, for that matter: that would be a good experiment to try.

As I was drawing the bead on the wire, the side of the "head" closest to the "arm" I was trying to create was in the flame of the torch, and the correction fluid caught on fire, but it never got all gray. So despite my fear of destroying the ring, I could tell it was safe, and I successfully finished the "arms" on all five rings. It was a good day!