Not technically part of the course, I had to create a clasp for marking as part of the tennis bracelet project. Since I was doing a necklace, I decided to give a sister clasp a go. One of the other students had done one and I liked the look of it. So I got out my Alan Revere Professional Jewelry Making book and looked to see what clasps were in there. He had a tutorial on the sister clasp, perfect!
I printed out the template (twice) onto label paper and placed it on the silver. He suggests gluing the two pieces together and cutting them together just once. But I decided to cut them both out. Mostly because the saw blades I use are very fine and they would have constantly broken at double the thickness of metal.
Next up I needed to file the sides down to round them out, making sure I did the opposite sides so that the flat sides were back to back and opposite.
There’s no soldering with this project which is a nice change for me. It’s great practice working with cold connections which I don’t have much experience with. I needed to cut a piece of tubing and saw a hole in each of the pieces to the right diameter of the tubing, making sure it was neat fit, not too large that it just slips through. Then using a ball bur I counter sinked the metal, this is so the tubing has somewhere to go on the next step. Once all this was done, I placed the two pieces together, put the tubing through the holes and I hammered it with a round headed tool that’s used to dome discs. This flared out the edges, I then flipped it over and did the same on the other side, then using a chasing hammer I made sure the tube was flush with the metal.
Then it was onto the polisher. I had to then solder a ring through the hole and chain and another jump ring on the other side of the chain.
It’s quite a simple but ingenious mechanism! But quite fiddly to make. All in all, another great project and I learnt more about rivets and cold connections.