Must have burs?

[SilverBouillon]

What burs are needed the most for setting job? I noticed that in Young's Stone Setting book ball burs are mostly used.
So, ball bur set is in shopping list. Do I need ball burs from 5 to 8 mm also?
Cup burs are also in wish list.

What about hart burs? I definitely need some of them, but which ones? 90degrees, 70 degrees? I have mostly 5-6-8 mm gems for setting. All I found in books is information that hart burs exist, that's very helpful.
Setting burs? Do I need them at all?

Help please
And I promise, no more questions... for a while.

[Wallace]

oh, keep on asking - it is lovely to be able to offer a tid-bit or read what someone else does. Sharing knowledge is excellent.

Burrs.... it will depend on the type of setting you want to do.

if you want to go for the flush and semi flush, Alan Revere recommends flame, stone and hart burrs. Getting hold of the burrs.... If you are near FDGTool (Orlando) you will be in a great position to get them economically and I will be very jealous! If you are thinking of tube setting with cabs, you would benefit from some inverted burrs to help create a ledge for them to sit on.


give us more of a clue to the direction. Chris, Dennis, Peter, James and several others will no doubt be more helpful. I mostly do flush, tube, or step bezels - but have only been at flush for the last year fully fledged.

look forward to more hints and tips from peeps.

[SilverBouillon]

oh, keep on asking - it is lovely to be able to offer a tid-bit or read what someone else does. Sharing knowledge is excellent.

Thank you, Wallace

I will create a short list going into quick inventory, sizes and settings I'm interested in. Actually, all of setting, I want to try them all, it's fascinating.

I'm far from Orlando, about 5 hours of driving. Yep, all the good things are up north. Oh, but I'm close to Graves company which makes lapidary tools.

[Dennis]

We all enjoy our favourite burrs, but a handy setter can tackle most jobs with only round burrs. All the others are luxuries in keeping with the definition posted by ps_bond on the other thread. Dennis.

[silken]

It really depends what type of setting work you'll be doing. I've amassed quite a collection of burrs over the past few years but my go to burrs for setting are:

Set of lynx ball burrs in various sizes (bought from rio grande)
Set of lynx setting burrs in various sizes (again, bought from rio grande)
Set of lynx hart burrs in various sizes (you guessed it, from rio grande)
Cup burrs in a couple of different sizes (useful for lots of things especially rounding off prong tips)
Inverted cone burrs/cylinders burrs in various sizes (great for tube setting cabs, as recommended by the lovely Peter and Dennis in a thread I made the other week)

Those are my essentials. I don't often use the hart burrs as I don't always cut a bearer seat but they're handy to have in the workshop. I also don't often use the setting burrs any more. I find it quite easy to set faceted stones simply by cutting a seat with a ball burr. With setting burrs, you have to make sure that the burr is cutting at exactly the correct angle otherwise you'll end up with a wonky seat. You don't have this problem with ball burrs. As Dennis said, experienced setters can do an awful lot of work with the most basic ball burrs but not enthusiasts such as myself, I like to have the whole collection there to make my life a little bit easier

[SilverBouillon]

Thank you guys!

Here is a bit on stones:

oval gems (10x12, 9x8, 8x6, 7x5, and smaller, some calibrated, some not) prong, crown setting, maybe tube setting too.
small sapphires, not calibrated, from 3.5mm to 3.2mm- flush setting, tube setting.
oval cabs 8x10 - tube, prong.

That's the basic list so far.

I see that I need to concentrate on ball burs.
Emily, yes I'm going to purchase from riogrande. They have set of 24 from 0.4 to 3.1mm and set of 14 from 2.7 to 8mm. I think it will cover all my possible basic needs for the beginning.

As for cup burs I like Bush concave burs, but they are alone almost 40 dollars (sobbing) From another side it's better to get good ones, I think.
http://www.riogrande.com/Product/Bus...t/346116?Pos=9

Only 3 sets of two kinds and $100 is there...

eta: I can get set of 12 ball burs from 0.5 to 2.5 and set of 14 from 2.7 to 8mm, and the total with cup burs will make $83.75- a bit better.

[silken]

You don't really need lots of different cup burrs, I get along with just 1.2mm and 2mm, but that's just me

I have the sets of 23 and 14 ball burrs from rio grande and they have lasted me a loooooong time.

Don't despair though, I don't know whether you have to pay extra sales tax but at least you don't have to pay import VAT and customs fees on them. Us poor souls in the UK usually get a nice little card through the door telling us that we need to pay some crazy amount before we can get our nice parcel full of tools delivered. That said, it still works out cheaper for me to buy the sets from rio and they have larger sizes available (sorry Cookies lol).

I would definitely recommend getting a few single inverted cone burrs or cylinder burrs for when you're tube setting cabochons, it saves so much faffing around trying to get the pesky cabs to sit still.

[ps_bond]

For prong setting, a 3-square file & a barette file work nicely. Hart burrs & cup burrs are nice to have - although I don't actually use hart burrs much - but you can do a lot with just the two files, albeit more slowly (cf accurate).
Flush setting (and grain setting) I use bud burrs and setting burrs for round stones; fancies require graver intervention (inverted cones are handy for cutting the bearing shelf).
Bezel setting - inverted cones and either the large round burr with the bottom cut off as suggested by Chris, or a decent size wheel burr with the bottom smoothed off.

GRAVERS!!! Onglette, bullstick, flat and round as a bare minimum - although I don't use the round for much other than bead raising if I haven't pre-cut the beads. They're more versatile than any burr.

Small burrs go blunt very quickly (0.5mm ball burrs for example); the sets are OK to find what you use most, then buy them in 6s. I've mostly switched to using shanked drills in a QR handpiece these days, but for a #30 handpiece jobber drill bits work nicely.

[Patstone]

Sounds like a trip to Florida coming on Wallace, I remember when I asked the same questions.

[SilverBouillon]

GRAVERS!!! Onglette, bullstick, flat and round as a bare minimum - although I don't use the round for much other than bead raising if I haven't pre-cut the beads. They're more versatile than any burr.

Yes! I did not add those in my tight budget yet. And for grain setting I also need beading tools. I can skip grain setting for later, but gravers must have, and they must be good quality.