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Such a basic question, I know. But I don’t want to ruin the amber. I want to mount this cabochon onto a 20mm disk of 2mm silver to make a pair of earrings. My first thought was to use a burr to make a shallow housing in the silver and then use an adhesive. Is this totally wrong, won’t work and or bad practice ?
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Oh gluing, that’s a question. If they are for your wife and are well made then why not. If you intend to sell them if you don’t feel up to making a rub over setting then you can buy them ready made but they often need a bit of extra work on them for cabochons I’ve found. I definitely wouldn’t glue for sale. Amber is quite soft being a resin but it’s easily repolished with careQuote:
Originally Posted by Ruedeleglise
Mmm, no I am quite happy to make the rub over setting, but was worried that it may make the earring rather heavy looking rather than “surface mounted”.
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Hi David, to me 2.0mm seems a bit thick for earrings. I would probably have chosen 0.9mm.
To make those bezel settings look less heavy, you could cut three or four little round scallops spaced around the top edges, using a small cylinder burr. This will also make the setting much easier.
Aim to do as much finishing and polishing as you can before hand, because amber marks easily. Dennis.
Good ideas. My only reason for the thickness was to have enough “meat” if I were to set Swarovskis into the silver. But now I have leant towards the amber; yes thinner makes good sense. Thanks.
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I agree with Dennis if weight is your worry. I would never make earrings any thicker than .9
The lady now wants a Swarovski Crystal! So I am back to mounting this on my now 0.9 silver! So how would you recommend doing this please? The idea of the thicker silver was to be able to burr out a hole to be able to sink the Crystal up to its widest diameter and use an adhesive to fix it there. I could of course have a small area of greater depth by soldering a “patch” of silver on the reverse so it would be invisible. Sorry to be a pain!
Well, 4.0 mm crystals will be accurate in size, so I would use some 4.5mm tubing, followed by a 4.0mm ball burr, and then a 4.0mm setting burr to make a tube setting. Done carefully it will leave very thin walls, easy to push over. Look up some YouTube demos.
The mistake beginners make is to have the edges too tall. The height is slightly less and no more than the table.
If she is having clear, I would go for CZ not Swarovski. Dennis
She wants “autumnal colour “ for the stone. Have just reticulated a piece of scrap silver and as she wants an irregular shape and texture I may well use this technique for the base of about 25 mm diameter. Thanks so much for the tube setting advice. This is really a great learning curve. Thank you all for your input. For me that is the value of this forum.
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