Cutting Silver for Making Jewelry

Video Transcript

"I'm DJ Poye, professional Jeweler and Gemologist and I am here today on behalf of Expert Village. Okay, we are ready to pierce or saw in the metal now. I will take, this is called burlife, it's a wax, it actually just allows the blade freely into the metal as we remove the small pieces of metal. So, I usually start where I feel is best it's going to be, so we're just going to start right here and I start by little bit of bringing it in, bringing it in and you want to make sure that you really hold this piece. So basically when you first start, you and to just start slowly. You want to make sure you keep the blade totally straight, you don't want to tilt it, or the blade will break. It's not that strong. So you hold it extremely, extremely hard here with your other hand and as you basically move in, after you get the burlife on it, that grooves it, you, you, you control the saw with the handle and you just bring it around. You can tell if your blade is going to be, if it needs more burlife or whatever because it'll start catching. Basically you just follow your template all the way around. They have really big machines that do this very fast, kind of from the old world a little bit, but this is how I was taught, I'm pretty proficient at it, I can do it very quickly. When you get to a point where you think that possibly that you want to get, eliminate that piece of metal, just cut it off. Once again, do your burlife because you want to try to save the saw blades because they're, they can be kind of expensive and a saw blade will last a good, a good portion of the time, and like I said you want to keep the blade totally straight. When you get it to a point where it needs to, where you want to turn, you start making a little circle and just, that's how you make it to where it's open and to where you can move forward. Now, you can tell where my piece of metal is, like I'm going a little bit slower because I don't have as much to hold onto. Alright, it's going to be at the very end of this again, and once again, you want to slow down to when you reach and end, you don't want to put any extra pressure on the blade or you want to save your blade again. So, there's that one side that's totally complete. Okay, we finished one side and I'm going to complete the other side and then we'll start moving into the next stage."