A Sassy Conspiracy

On Sunday I finally got around to making the Zydrate pendant I’d been thinking about and used the opportunity to take a few action shots so I could cobble together this little tutorial. Bear with me, it’s my first tutorial, so hopefully it’ll make sense!aa

START!
The first step is to draw your design on the metal you will be cutting your pendant out of. I’ve covered my silver with white masking tape to give me a surface to sketch on. I outline the final design with a fine-tip marker. You could draw directly on the metal too, the marker will come off during polishing, but I prefer this method.

Mark each area that needs to be cut out inside the pendant with an awl, to better guide your drill bit. The metal is fairly soft so not too much pressure is needed.

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Carefully position the drill bit (used here is a 1/32″) on the points you marked with your awl and drill. I’m using a large drill with a tiny bit, so I do this on a low speed. Don’t drill too close to your lines so that you have room for error.

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Lubricate the blade of your handsaw with beeswax. This will help it cut more smoothly and keep the blade from catching and jumping as much. It doesn’t take much - just run the blade through and then carefully use your fingers to rub it down the length of the blade.

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Begin carefully cutting out the shape. Be sure to cut a little on the outside of the line - you can easily refine the shape with files, but if you cut too much off when sawing, there isn’t a whole lot you can do to correct it. Keep your saw straight and perpendicular to the piece (you can see that my blade is not perfectly perpendicular… whoops!). This part is time consuming - don’t force your saw, just move it gently up and down and let the saw’s teeth do the work. One tip that has been helpful for me is to loosely hold the saw’s handle with the thumb and pointer finger only when sawing until you get used to the fact that you don’t need to apply force. This is where a benchpin is very useful to support your work while you’re sawing. Try to keep your saw in one position and rotate the piece as you cut.

Another important thing to remember when using your handsaw is to keep the blade straight (left/right) because if you twist it, it will snap from the tension. Once you’ve cut out the shape, release the saw blade, feed it through the pilot holes you drilled, restring the blade and then cut these areas out too. Now you’re done the hard part! Peel off the tape.

Carefully refine your edges with needle files. You may find you need to use the saw again to touch up some of the corners. When using your files, never drag the file back against your work since it will dull the file.

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Polish the edges of your work with sanding sticks and polishing papers. Remember to use a series of progressively finer grit polishing papers, and each time you change the grit of your paper, change the direction you polish in (so that you are polishing at a 90 degree angle from what you were doing with the last grit of paper). I picked up my favorite papers  at Lee Valley - they’re for honing knife edges. Polish the surface of your piece (only with the finest grits unless there are significant scratches to remove). When polishing the surface, place your piece on a rubber bench block - it will help grip the piece so it doesn’t slide around.

Once you have all the nicks and scratches nicely polished out, run your piece through a tumbler for 30-60min until its nice and shiny (check my earlier post for tips on how to set up your own tumbler using a hobby rock tumbler). All done!

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Here are the tools that were used for this project (the drill and tumbler are missing from this shot). Jewelers saw frame and blade, beeswax, awl, needle files, rubber bench block, sanding stick and polishing papers, old wooden cutting board to drill on.

This is my tumbler, a converted hobby rock tumbler.

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And the finished product…

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I’d love some comments - am I making sense, is more detail needed? Hopefully someone out there will find this tutorial helpful :)

Concerning the pendant itself, its big - a little over 2″ in width. I may try to redo it with a slightly smaller font, though I kind of like the size. I also like hanging it off center - the other two pendants were more evenly distributed because each started and ended with letters that occupied similar amounts of space, whereas this one is much heavier on the left side. Hanging it in this way compliments the design i think. If you don’t know what Zydrate is, then you need to go watch Repo! The Genetic Opera!