Making a Filigree Opal Ring: A Silversmithing Project

Hi, welcome to Chad's Silversmithing. Before we get too far into the video, if you wouldn't mind hitting the like button, that helps to get my channel promoted, and I do appreciate that. I also love it when people leave comments, so if you have a thought about the video, or a question, or you want to tell me how you do things, or whatever, I really like to hear those things from you. So I'm in the mood to do something swirly and pretty, so I'm going to make kind of a filigree-ish ring. It's been a while since I've done something like this, so I drew something up. I picked out a little pretty Ethiopian opal that's kind of teardrop shaped, and I think it'll make for a good centerpiece for it, and hopefully it'll come out pretty. We'll see. Before we do that, though, I wanted to thank some groups of people. I'd like to welcome a new patron, Nancy W. Thanks for signing up. I think you'll find that it's a great group of people over there with lots of great interactions and tons of skill to pull from, so get to know some of those people and share your ideas. I thank you also to all of my previous patrons. I couldn't do this without you. My other group of people is my YouTube subscribers. We just passed 21,900, I believe, which is awesome. Thank you for that. Thank you also for the kind comments, and super thanks, and the buy me a coffees, and buying my ebooks, and merch, and all that kind of stuff. That really helps a lot. So silver's gotten pretty expensive lately, and it really helps to keep me in some supplies, so I appreciate that. All right, well, let's get started on this project. So this is one of my design idea sketchbooks that you can find on my merch store if you're interested. The more recent ones have some useful charts and things on the back. This particular one has a gauge to inches to millimeters chart, which I use all the time. I find it pretty useful. One thing I really like about them is that they have the grid pattern in the background. It helps me to keep things kind of symmetrical, but it's not as obtrusive as graph paper, so I kind of like that. And when I started my channel, I started drawing up all of my projects just because it's nice to be able to go back and see what you did, and if you want to repeat it or do something similar without having to remember the 500 projects you've done recently, find out what you did. Okay, let me show you the opal here. This is a pretty little Ethiopian opal. I think that I really like the Ethiopian opals. They're kind of gel opals. They have lots of color play inside of a translucent kind of matrix, so very pretty. And I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to make that the center point there, and I'm going to do some little swirly curlicues around it with some little silver balls. I kind of sketched up what I was planning on doing. I'm going to use, well for the bezel on this, I'm going to use 26 gauge, which is 0.41 millimeters thick. I get it at 3 16ths inch tall, which is 4.76 millimeters, but I usually cut it down. It's just a tall size you can modify to suit your needs. The bottom of the bezel I'm going to use 22 gauge, which is 0.66 millimeters I believe. And there's two things I'm going to use for the swirls here. For the outer ones like this, I'm going to use a 16 gauge round wire that I'm going to flatten a little bit with my chasing hammer. And then these inner ones, I twisted up a little bit of 22 gauge round wire so that it's pretty fine like that. And then what we're going to do is flatten that out a little bit too with the chasing hammer. You could also run it through your rolling mill if you have a rolling mill. That would work just as well. I just thought since a lot of people don't, I would just flatten it with my hand with my little hammer so because that works fine too. And those will be the little inner pieces here. So this part will all be see-through here, so you'll actually see these bands going underneath that. The bands themselves are going to be 14 gauge square and that is 1.6 millimeters. I use a lot of 14 gauge square. It's a useful size for me. But let's start by making a bezel for this. And one of the things I always tell people if they've not done a stone that has a point on it like this, don't put the point where the bezel comes together on the point because that will cause a lot of problems. So we're going to make a sharp bend like that. Initially we'll use that as the point of the stone. Trust me on this. So we'll get that tight in there and then we can kind of wrap it around there. Okay, I hear something. There's one. We'll make a little mark just past where they meet so I have a little filing room. I want this to be snug but with opals being kind of fragile, I don't want it to be so tight that I have to really force it or anything. Nothing worse than breaking a stone. Well, I mean there's other things that are worse than that I suppose, but it's still kind of a bummer. Let's file that. I already filed the first edge. All right, let's solder that closed. If you haven't been to my channel before, I use primarily hard silver sheet solder. I will occasionally use a little paste solder at various temperatures if I need to. This is a liquid flux that I dribble on with a dropper bottle. My torch is a silver smith model. It's a settling air torch, so it draws in atmospheric air through these little holes and mixes it with the gas in the nozzle here. It's hotter than a propane torch but not near as hot as an oxy-acetylene. It's perfect for working with silver as far as I'm concerned. I use a number one tip for almost everything. I already have a little bit of solder here it looks like, so I'm just going to go ahead and use that for this. If you've never made twisted wire like I did for the filigree part of this, I have a video about that. It's pretty simple. You just use your drill, but here's a link to that video if you're interested. Years ago somebody showed me that and I was like, oh duh. I was going to hand twist it, but it's getting to be that time of year where I'm going to be doing some outdoor shows. So I may look a little haggard in my videos. More haggard than usual. Doing outdoor shows is tiring. I believe that's about right. So now let's put a bottom on this. Give it a nice connection. Let's file this a little bit on the bottom. Let's see if I have any little pieces of 22 gauges. I do. So I think we can take a little piece off of there. I want to make sure this is nice and flat. Normally I probably just use 26, which is even thinner, but I want it to be a little stiff so that it's a good place to attach that filigree kind of stuff that I do. And I think it'll just make it a little sturdier. So filigree is typically made from very skinny twisted wire, sometimes flattened. And occasionally I'll do something that's all swirly like that, but don't use twisted wire. I usually call that faux filigree. I don't know if that's a correct term or not, but that kind of is what I call it. I didn't understand when I first started doing this. I'd see really lacy looking things and I thought that was all filigree. Some of it is open pierce work where people would cut out very fine designs out of sheet. And in a lot of ways to me that's much harder than filigree or something, I think. But that's probably because I'm better at filing and soldering than I am at sawing. I'm just going to put a few of these in here. Nudge them up against the sides. I am getting better at sawing though. There's some real amazing people with saws out there, but that is not me. But I am getting more comfortable with it. I avoided it for many years. A big part of that was I was using an inferior saw. So get yourself a nice saw if you're going to do that kind of stuff. Don't cheap out on it. Okay, so I'm just going to trim off the excess on this and we'll file it flush. I just passed 500 videos, which blows my mind. I expect you to get on it and watch all of those if you haven't yet. It shouldn't take you too long. So now let's do some flattening of some wire. This is that 16 gauge that I was talking about. And I'm just going to take my chasing hammer. The reason I want to hammer this so it's flatter is that will make it stronger vertically this way and also give it a skinnier profile when you look at it from the top. So I think it'll look a little more delicate. And hammering is cathartic as well. Get rid of all that pent-up anger. Okay, so now I'm going to start thinking about the design. Not that. And I was thinking let's make this one here be one of these. It's getting pretty small. So I'm thinking let's, we're not perfect but we're close. We're going straight into that side there. So we cut it straight off and then file it. That's going to go kind of right there. Let's solder that on just for giggles and then we'll start adding other components. That'll probably work. Okay and I'm going to do something called pick soldering. If you want to see how to do pick soldering I'll put a link up there for you. It's a good video and it's a useful skill. It allows you to place solder pretty precisely once you That gets us a little bit closer. Okay so let's do, we have another one of these that comes out from there. So let's try and make that. It's actually not too bad. So let's mark it about right there because it needs to meet that bezel at an angle a little bit. So I think on this one I drew it pretty close to attaching there but I scaled up a little bit here and this stuff, it's going to be pretty thin but I don't know if I can get that much detail in there. I might have to reduce the amount of that in there but we'll see. I'll have to kind So my point, my original point was I think I'm going to solder it so it's attached over here but not there. That makes sense. Maybe one of you filigree experts could tell me if I'm right on the traditional filigree and stuff. It could just be something I'm seeing. That time I did, I've had so many people tell me today that I helped them to get over their fear of trying this. That really makes me feel good you know. Sometimes we're our own worst enemies when it comes to thinking we can't do things. Most things I feel like people can can do if they put enough time into it. I never thought I'd be able to do this kind of stuff when I first took a class years ago. Just like anything, the more you practice it, the easier it gets. And you got to remember to always realize there's always new stuff to learn. For a long time I got caught in a time loop I guess. Just a state where I could not, oops I should have, I should have done that. I get to talking and I forget what I'm doing. For a long time I didn't, I didn't branch out and try things that I hadn't tried before. And I was making pretty much the same things. Which, you know, it's good practice but it's more fun when you learn how to do something you haven't done before. I think. I like that maybe. Kind of getting in the right, right frame. That kind of looks like that is a continuous one. And this one we can kind of make look like a continuous end from this one too. I think that's a good idea. Okay, so let's solder this one on. No mistakes, only happy accidents. Oh, that's true. I make mistakes now that aren't happy accidents. This one's going to kind of come straight, straight out of there and curve back in. Sometimes it takes me a while when I'm drawing random kind of swirls and things like that to come up with a pleasing kind of configuration. Hopefully this one turns out that way. I think it, when I was looking at it, it seemed pretty cool to me. But we'll see. Sometimes I think something's going to look good and then when I'm done I'm like, oh, that happens on these videos occasionally. I don't always love what I make. But sometimes it's a really good learning experience, you know, even if it doesn't produce something, you know, that you're amazed by. Once in a while you get something pretty good. That's part of the fun, I think. If you knocked it out of the park every time, this would be boring, wouldn't it? It's starting to look like an angry octopus that wants to fight. All right, so let's, let's flatten out some of this wire and see how it works. Because of the tightness of the little loops we're going to have to make in this, I'm going to, since I've worked hard and just by, not only by twisting it, but by then pounding on it, that has a tendency to make the metal really hard and springy. And I think that's going to work against me if I leave it like that. So we're going to soften the metal back up just by heating it up and letting it cool down a bit. You see the metal kind of relaxes as the work hardening leaves it. And I was going to put two inside of here. I don't know if I can do that, but let's see how small of a loop we can get. This is one of the problems that I run into when I'm doing this sort of stuff, is my tools are just too big for me to, to make the size of loops that I want to, even when I go at the very tips of some of these. So I'm curious, people who do this all the time, what are your tricks? So I want it to be kind of up, up in there like that. So I'm going to try and get that bit narrower. It's to be in there just a little tighter. Almost had to crawl around on the floor for that. Okay, now I'm going to cut some very small pieces of solder. I'm going to solder it here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. In theory, we'll see. Hopefully nothing moves around too much. Pretty small pieces this time. We'll see how it works. A real trick when you're soldering together things is disparate mass like this. These little wires have very little mass to them, so they take longer to get up to the solder flow temperature than this big thing that we've already created. So Yeah, I kind of like that. That's not exactly what I drew, but I kind of like filling that space that Pretty close. Just a tiny bit more. All right, let's find the center of those. Pretty close anyway. That's my ruler. Pretty close. I'm going to bend these out just a skosh. Square wire always tries to twist a little bit on you, so you might want to be aware of that. Lay these down. They may be a little not flat. Like I was telling you, these are going to try and turn sideways on you a little bit, so correct that as you go. You can configure these however you want. They can turn inwards or outwards or whatever, or you could even leave them straight if you wanted to. Let's fish that. It's probably not all that pickled yet, but let's take a look at it. Maybe like that. Kind of like that. I think I need to turn these inwards a little bit. Also, let's see what size it was at. It's a little bigger than I was shooting for, so let's trim those ends just a skosh. I'm going to try and get these to file these flat without messing up too much. Let's use a little medium paste solder on this one. It must be getting shaky. So far I'm liking that. Let's make sure we got a good solder joint on the bottom here on all these. Okay, well I'm going to let that pickle and feed my hungry wife. She's probably getting hangry right now. I'll come polish that up and set that stone. So I got everything kind of cleaned up and polished and I'm ready to set this. Now one of the things I do when I have a point on a stone like this is it's hard to get all of the bezel to compress in there nicely, so I generally file it thinner at the tip, at the very top there a little bit. So I'm going to start there, and I do this a little differently than some, but I use my flat side of my chain nose as a bezel pusher. So I'm going to get that started over there and then straight across from it. Same thing. Go to the sides a little bit. You've got to be a little careful with opals because they can be broken pretty easily, scratched. Alright, once we feel like we got that pushed down over, we can go ahead and burnish it. That's where I use the rounded outer part of this. It's going to rub that top edge right. Doesn't look exactly like I was planning, but it's close. So I'll get that cleaned up a little better and get some pictures at the end. Alright, that's pretty fancy. Tell me what you think. Do you like it? Do you not like it? I feel like the only criticism I would have is maybe I made this go out a little bit too far, or I should have turned this a little bit more so it was facing more that way. Let me know what you think. OK, well that was the filigree opal ring. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, make sure to hit the like button, and I'd love it if you'd take a moment and visit my main channel page. I just updated the main channel page too so that I have a playlist on there that includes all of the videos chronologically. I just realized that if you just go to the video tab, it doesn't show all of the videos, so that should make it a little bit easier for you to access some of my older videos if you can't find them. So there's 500 videos there now. I've been doing these three per week for about three and a half years, and so there's tons of content. I'm sure you'll find something else interesting or useful. So check them out, subscribe to my channel, and don't forget to hit the video description down below. There's some important links there. There's a link to my Patreon if you want to find out more about that community. There's a link to my merch store where you can get those nice design ideas sketchbooks to keep track of your projects in. I find those invaluable. And there's a link to buy my ebooks if you want to get yourself one of those guides. There's one for 2023 and one for 2024. Each one is a guide to all of the videos in that particular year, and it includes a page for each one with lots of extra information as well as a link right to the video. So it's a nice way to have a whole bunch of projects right at your fingertips, and a super nice way to support my channel. So thanks for that in advance. All right, well thanks for watching today. Happy silversmithing!