Beginning Silversmithing Tool Kit

Alright, we're back. This box has a series of boards that make a 24 by 30 inch area for your workspace. That is a fire resistant board. It's called tempered hardboard. It works really good to slow the flame down. It will burn but it burns slow. Uh, recommended if you drop some hot something on it, you'd definitely put water on it, put it out. But you can also buy a whole sheet of it for eight bucks at uh, Lowe's, Bernard's, home Depot, those kind of places. Uh, in case you wanna cover your whole table or maybe use it for a floor roller if you got carpet. That's a chair roller for floor. I'm gonna open some of these tools now. Let me get this one up here. This is a spider. And the spider. There's a whole website out there on my side to show you how it's used, but I'll go ahead and get you a quick view here. Alright, it's unwrapped. Now this is what it looks like. The three legs go in various spots and it's used for putting on bales and other components. Alright, that's a spider. This is a 10 piece file set. One of these files is really special. It has only three sides on those three sides. Two of 'em are flat and one of 'em has teeth that enables us to file next to things in the cracks and in square corners without damaging the other side. There's a lot of other nice files in this kit, but that is the most important one. That is a memory wire cutter. What's nice about it is when we're cutting bales and and round things, it has a sharp cut so it makes a nice sheer cut. It doesn't have squished up edges or points like you do with dikes. That is a straight shear. It is very nice for materials, good clean cut. It is designed to cut anything 20 gauge or less. These jaws are fairly thin so you can get close to things with them when you're shearing. But your problem is if you take and put something too big in there, it's gonna spread this and ruin your shears. It should shear, should not fold something over. I recommend when you're, when you're first starting, when you're cutting things cut as close back in the jaw, you can, that should help you with uh, keeping your shears last longer. This is a looping pli. This is used for making bales. Typically, I would, uh, wrap my bale around one of these jaws after finishing. This is a copper tongs. This is the only tool that we allow in the pickle. We don't wanna ruin our pickle, we don't wanna take the plating off our tweezers, so that's the only the pickle. This is a needle nose tweezer with a wooden handle so that you can handle it when it's hot. I don't recommend you put it into the flame, uh, but you can get it warm a little bit without ruining it. This is a cross lock tweezer or inspection tweezer. The old fellas used to put diamonds in there and look at 'em and look at their light and check your gym faces and stuff like that. But we use it to hold things in place without us having to hold them. It is not really good for manipulating solder, whereas that other one I just showed you is this is a crosscut file. Notice how it goes both directions. It's pretty aggressive, but it's really nice to have a little bit bigger one than some of those that are in the package. This is a titanium pick. This allows you to move materials around when you're working so that you can push things around. This is a metric and inches scale. Uh, actually is it a scale or a ruler? I don't know. It measures things. This beginning kit comes with a 9 2 5 punch. It's good for rings. I believe it is a one millimeter punch. This is a bezel roller. We use it for tightening up scallop and serrated bezels and burnishing on the sides for plane vessels and those other vessels. So that is the main small tool kit. Let's look at some expendables. These are blue and yellow wheels. That's a silicon wheel with some aluminum oxide in it for making rough grinding and, and actually this is called a fine wheel, but it really works really fast and takes a lot of material off. This is a yellow buffing wheel. Muzzling wheel, one inch. This is some white diamond polishing compound. This is a rough compound, so if you've made a mess or you have to get something off, it's a lot of material, you can do that. This is called z. It is a finer, uh, polishing material. This is my final polishing material. Some folks actually use those to cut stones and find polish on stones. Four face masks. You always wanna wear. You always wanna wear a face mask when you're polishing. And of course you want your safety glasses while when you're, when you're doing your work. These are t pins, 100 of them. So we use those to pin things on our charcoal block while we're working so that we have the ability to hold things in place. If we get in an emergency, typically we don't have those touching the metal, but they're there in case something goes wrong and that's when we might use the pick. These are binder clips. I use those for holding bales up while I pre solder them. These are two fine miss spray bottles. They have a pattern that's fairly covered. You might have a little open hole in the middle, but for the most part you have a round pattern that gets a nice spray. Two of 'em come in the kit. Okay, that was the expendables kit. Next we have the dry acid pickle pound of that flux mix. Eight ounces of that set of dowels for holding and shaping. We use those a lot in our glasses. Keeps our fingers out of the proximity of hammers and things. We have a ring clamp. What's nice about the ring clamp is it has a leather jaw on both ends that allow you to hold things while you're polishing 'em. You put them in that end, push your wedge down against something, then you can go into your grinders and polishers or hold it and use your tools around it or put it in a device and use two hands on it. This is a nylon hammer. I'm gonna suggest that when you get this, you go ahead and put some some glue on here and tighten it down as tight as you can. These heads are replaceable, but nobody has the replacements. Uh, the hammer's only like a $16 hammer. So this weight is, is a reason that they have to have the screw in heads just to give it a little bit more mush. When you're hitting with this hammer, you wanna make sure you hit very, very flat. 'cause like all hammers, if you hit it to the side a little bit, you're gonna make dents. Some of my students have said that they taken, they round these a little bit better than they are. I find that if you're hammering flat like you're supposed to be with a hammer, you won't get many marks with it. This is a three pound bench block. It's premium surface on all sides. Be careful. The edges are sharp. You may want to deber those yourself when you get it home. This is a ring man draw. It goes from size 16 down to size one. We use it to hammer on. We use it to size ring. This is a dome chasing hammer. You wanna be careful with it not to hit solid things with it or you will damage it or the solid things. Typically you're making a contemporary hammered finish with that particular hammer. We then have a charcoal block. This is a two and a half by five. We also include a wire for wrapping it so that the first time you heat it up, it doesn't break apart. And of course we have the hand, the, the torch that I like the most. We have, it's the one that has the gauge on it. My favorite torch has a safety lock so you can't pull the trigger and then an unlock when you're getting these kind of torches. You wanna be really careful when they come. They're all the way open, so you wanna turn it all the way to the right. You don't wanna force it once you get there. Once it stops, leave it there. Don't keep playing with it. You'll, you can ruin the valve by over tightening it. And then of course we have the lazy Sue soldering board that comes in your kit as well. Thanks for watching. You can, you can find these tools@spiderholedown.com as a group. You can find them individually@silversmithingclasssupplies.com or you can find 'em in my class. Come take one. If you come to the retreat, the box is included in the beginning class as well as the intermediate box. Hope to see you there.

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