Making The Bale for A Piece Of Jewelry

Video Transcript

"I'm DJ Poye, professional Jeweler and Gemologist, and I am here today on behalf of Expert Village. We're going to solder, solder the bail onto the piece. So you'll be using a small micro torch. And what I usually do is I have a propane tank. It burns really clean. So, that's the reason I use propane. Unlike acetylene that's kind of a dirty, and so I just use propane, it's easy to maneuver and to move around. You can buy these small tanks. So I turn my propane tank on. I turn my oxygen tank on, and I usually like it about eight pounds and it looks like they're both about eight pounds of pressure. And so what you basically try to do first and always do first is that you will ignite the gas part, which is red. So depending on what hand you hold it in, turn it. Hold the torch with three of your fingers and when your thumb and index finger, turn it on just a little bit. And take a a striker or a lighter and just bring it on. And then you can make the flame...I always say about an inch or so. This gets you ready to get prepared for everything else. I always turn my torch on. I clean the line out a little bit, make sure it all runs great. So what we want to do first is and I've already got one made but I wanted to kind of explain to you a little bit about what we're going to do is we're going to make the bail out of some round wire. You can really make bail, which is what the chain will go through. You can really make it out of any kind of wire, half round wire, square wire, but round wire is nice and easier to clean up from the underneath side. So you can get a piece of round wire and what you can do is get your round nose pliers. Okay. And what I usually do is just take a piece of the wire and bring it on around to the round the biggest part of the round nose part. Small little, basically about a half circle. Usually what I usually end up doing too as well when I make the piece, what I do is I place it into some flat pliers, and I will file off just the bottom, like this. Or an abret file just means that the file is only on one side of the file. There's nothing on the other side. But what we're going to do is just go through one simple movement through it, and just make to where the back of that small little wire part, that's the bail, is just flat. When you take it and place it in a set of pliers and put it on a flat surface, you want to make sure that it's flat. And it going to, when you attach it to a piece of jewelry, that you're going to have a flush solder. "