This was a great project to work on. Still took a few hours, but I enjoyed it and it came with a satisfying click at the end!
A box clasp is mainly used for a string of pearls, the knitted end goes into the box and the other end attaches to the clip. But it can be used for other pieces too by soldering a jump ring and attaching it to a chain. The box we made was 1cm square, so quite big, but that was mostly so that it wasn’t too fiddly, but they do come in much smaller sizes and now I know what I’m doing, I’d like to make it with square tubing.
I didn’t take too many photos of this one as I was in the zone making the catch which probably took the same amount of time to make as the box, but had more steps which o forgot to photograph!
First I needed to create the walls and mitre the ends so that they fit up nicely together. It turned out a little lopsided, but not too bad, the walls were thick so I was able to file it down a little to make it a little more even. Still not 100% plumb, but good enough for me.
I enjoy soldering and would say I’ve pretty much mastered it at this point in my career, so any project that has lots of soldering I’m ok with!
Next up was the clasp, or clip. This goes into the box and secures the two pieces together, it goes in with a click and is removed by pushing down on it, it’s kind of like a tension spring.
I started with a strip of metal, the same size as the hole I’d cut out of the box earlier, a few measurements later and a little bit of soldering, hammering and sawing, I was left with a piece that inserted nicely into the hole. I then needed to lift up two edges on it which would hold it in place and catch onto the wall when it was pushed inside the box and released. This needed a couple of goes back and forth to ensure they were high enough to catch the wall and were flush with it too.
Once I got that click to work and everything was secure, I needed to drill a couple of holes which would be for the string of a necklace (if you were using this for a string of pearls) and then onto polishing.
I wish I had thought about polishing the clip as I had gone along as that had a lot of file marks that needed to be cleaned up.
All in all, whilst it took a few hours, I was happy with it being a fairly simple project.