Joining The Dots

**Dennis** · 05-10-2015, 10:12 AM

Starting with some 9mm moonstone cabs, I was asked to make some irregular shaped trapezoid ear studs, essentially made from two V-shapes joined together.

Well, having covered an A4 sheet with useless doodles, I decided that some sort of variable drawing aid was needed.

So using some straight copper wire, I cut off four rods and soldered tiny tubes to the end of each to act as hinge knuckles.

One pair rods was joined by passing a pin through their tubes and then stuck into a soft soldering board, covered in paper. The other two were connected in the same way, but with the pin upside down, so that it could slide around on its head.
This allowed me to make rapid changes to the V shapes around a bezel cup until there was some kind of symmetry.

Once to my liking, the ends of the rods were marked on the paper with red dots and the paper punched to transfer the dots directly onto the board. For the second image, the paper was turned over. All that remained was to join the dots.

That was the drawing bit. I won’t bore you with the rest.

1.3mm triangular wire, pin diameter 0.5mm, ext. diameter of tubes, 1.3mm. Dennis.