Elesa

Chuck Koehler

 

IT ALL STARTS WITH THE STONE:
While at the Atlanta Bench Jewelers Conference, my friend Elesa Dillon (the national sales manager for Southern Jewelry News and Mid America Jewelry News, which I also write for) asked me to help her pick out a gemstone to have made into a ring.  After looking at several choices, we selected a 14mm cabochon cut carnelian.  We sat at our booth that afternoon and Elesa shared a few thoughts with me about what she would like.  We came up with several ideas, and decided on the sketch pictured. Now, I am tasked with turning that idea, into reality.  Here‘s how I did it.

WHERE TO START?:
This is my first foray into the colored waxes that came out last year.  I’ve always used the blue carving waxes because I like the consistent makeup of product, but ... I’m going to try something new today.  This photo shows the piece I cut from the tube, which I decided should be 16mm wide, (which would later prove to be a mistake).  Next, I used a wax sizing mandrel, photo b, to bring it up to within a half size of the finished size. I like to leave the wax around a half size small to accommodate for filing, annealing, and basically just beating the crap out of it with a hammer, which stretches it up a little.

FINDING CENTER:
This photo shows the wax blank being spun on my flex shaft.  This is a wax carving trick someone taught me years ago.  In order to find center, I drill a hole in the top, and very carefully drill all the way through the ring.  Then I spin it on my flex shaft and see if it turns true (which it never does the first time).  I study the wax to see where it’s off center, and then drill a slightly larger hole, cheating towards center.  Then I spin it again and check it.  It usually takes three or four times to get it right, but the advantage is I now have dead center on the top and the bottom.

ROUGHING OUT THE WAX:
This photo shows how I use a flat bottom wax carving bur to carefully ream out a 14mm hole, and drop the stone in about 3mm deep.  I free handed this part, and just eyeballed the seat for the stone.  Sometimes that’s easier than spending 30 minutes measuring. (remember, this is not rocket science, it’s much harder and requires more talent and skill).  I ground away some material on the sides, and now I need to work on the bottom.  Using your optivisor, look closely at picture e. See the red dot? That is the center hole that I made early on in the this project.  It came in real handy here to know where the center of the bottom was, once I got this far.  Now I know that the top and bottom are perfectly aligned.

KNOWING WHAT TO REMOVE:
If you’re new to wax carving, this photo, with the really rough looking wax pattern is very typical.  They always look like this during the carving process.  I’ve been carving wax for over 20 years, and they still look like this in process.  You can get very frustrated when you’re starting out because your waxes don’t look like the finished product.  I wanted you to see this photo to know that that is very common.

TIP: Sometimes, when carving a wax, you don’t know exactly where you’re going.  Instead of looking at what material should stay, (i.e.. the final product) only look at the extra material that needs to go.  Look at photo f photo again with your optivisors. Notice how the top, being held by the tweezers, is rounded, while the bottom of the photo is still square (note to self: gold wax does not photograph well, go back to blue for magazine articles). When I got to this point, I didn’t quite know what direction I was heading, so I only looked at the material I knew didn‘t belong, and went that direction for a little while.

CORRECTING MY FIRST MISTAKE:
Remember I said that I cut a 16mm piece of wax?  It proved to be too thin on the edges to do what I wanted to do. I actually knew this way early on, but knew that I could fix it when the time came, which is now.

Wax is a very forgiving medium to work with. If you’ve got too much, you file it off.  If you’ve filed too much off, you add wax back.  I’m not afraid to get out my wax pen and glop some more wax on. This photo shows how I added about 2mm more wax to the edges of the ring to get a more rounded look. 

 

Remember, when making custom jewelry, you’re usually making something you’ve never made before, so you can’t work out every problem in advance.  In this case, I just went with the flow, and fixed it as I went along.  Notice that the material that I’m melting onto my ring is from the same tube I started with.  You don’t want to mix waxes on custom carving jobs.  Different waxes react differently to filing and polishing will give you inconsistent results, so I always recommend repairing with exact same wax.

A LITTLE IS GOOD, A LOT’S BETTER:
Once I added the wax to the side, I really wished that the bezel was taller.  So ... I made it taller.  Look at the photo and see how I raised the bezel to the new height.  The red line on the picture was the original height. You can see that I raised it about 2 mm.  Once again, since I’ve never made this piece before, how in the world am I supposed to work out every detail in advance? 

 

But, photo i, shows the payoff.  This is exactly what I was looking to create.  But ... how am I going to get the stone out without destroying the wax pattern?  Very carefully, that‘s how.  Wax is a very forgiving medium, so if you go really slow, it’ll bend, and stretch, and not break.  So I very carefully begin to push the stone out from the bottom, and spend about 10 minutes working it out.  It came out with a little damage to the bezel.  This photo, shows the bezel repair on the top of the picture.  I added wax to fix the minor tears that occurred, but I didn’t file them down in the wax, I’ll do that in the metal.  I’m done with the wax, let’s cast?

 

Elesa continued