Sizing Up A Ring

Series Summary

Do you have an idea for a beautiful necklace design? From earrings and bracelets to single stranded and elaborate multi-stranded necklaces, creating your own jewelry is fun, easy to learn, and can even be done at home. All it takes is the desire to create, the willingness to learn, and finally practicing your newly acquired craft. Making your own jewelry is a fun way to express your creative fashion talents. Whether you want to work with beads, stones, gems, metals, hemp or any other material, the basic construction methods are fairly simple. Custom handmade jewelry also makes a fine gift for birthdays or holidays.

In this free video series, our expert Joe Maughan will teach you how to repair and re-size jewelry. He'll show you how to size a ring up and down, how to stretch a ring, and how to tighten a stone setting. He'll then show you how to re-size watches & bracelets, how to clean jewelry, how to use a jewelry torch, how to use the flex shaft tool, and he'll show you some hand tools used for jewelry repair. He'll show you how to use the mechanical ring stretcher, different mandrels, the rolling mill, and repair files. Joe will also teach you how to use the buffing machine, the ultrasonic cleaner, and the steam cleaner. After showing you the different tools and machinery, Joe will then tell you about wax casting, how to sketch jewelry, and how to measure gemstones. Joe will even show you how to check the prongs, and give you some valuable presentation tips.

Video Transcript

"Hello, on behalf of expert village, my name is Joe. I own "The Vug" local jeweler in Salt Lake City, Utah. Today I am going to show you how to size a ring up professionally. You take a basic ring, you take your jewelers saw a copping saw, cut the ring in half. This ring was a seven and a half. You slide it up the mandrel to lets say we are going to size it up to a ten. You would put a piece of metal in it, approximately that gap size, put it in your little vice. Take a piece of silver sauder or gold sauder, what ever you are sizing, trim off a little piece, maybe put a little flux on the gap. Basically with a propane and oxygen or propane acetylene which most jewelers use you pick up the piece of sauder. You generally have two pieces of sauder, one ready for each side of the gap. Weld that gap shut. Make sure the sauder flows all the way through each gap. Quench this in acid which will basically clean all the fire scale and everything off of the ring. Take a basic file, you want to file around the outside of the ring across the sides of the ring with a flat file and then take a half round file and file the inside of the ring to round it back out. Basically for that it is ready for polishing."