How to Flush Set a Stone

Hey, Skyler here with Change You Can Wear and Sojourn Fine Jewelry and today we're going to be flush setting a quarter carat diamond. So I'm lining it up right now and once it's perfectly lined up I will take a scribe and press down through the top of the culet right to the stone pushing it out of the way and marking the center. Once it's marked we'll get the stone out of the way and then get a punch, this one's an auto punch, and just make a divot right where that mark is. Once we've done that we can drill it out. This is a one millimeter drill that we're using and then we'll switch to ball burrs after that. So we're going to start with a smaller ball burr and work our way up to a larger one. This one's a 1.5 millimeters what I start with and this particular one I'm pushing all the way through this pendant but you don't have to if you don't want to go all the way through something just go to the bottom of the ball burr. Anyway now we're going up in size this one's probably a 2.2 millimeters something like that and then we're going to end up here in a second with the largest ball burr which is a 3.1 millimeter is what I'm going to stop with before I switch to setting burrs. Once we have that one cut out we'll go to a setting burr and this is going to be just the same size as the stone that we're going to be setting. You want it to be a really snug fit and as we are making our seat you can see that perfect sidewall and the perfect seat right there we want to cut about halfway up the side of that straight wall on the setting burr and once you get about that depth usually it's about correct. Once we have that done we're going to turn the pendant around and we're going to countersink all that flashing and stuff off there. We want to make sure it has a nice clean bevel on the other side. You can't do this once you put the stone in so make sure you do it before the stone goes in. Once we have it done we will test our fit and so this particular diamond fits a teeny tiny bit too loose but it's going to work out really good actually. It fits in there nice and flush. You're checking to make sure it's level that you have enough depth on your sidewall to push over the top of the stone which we do here and we're going to be taking our burnisher now and we're going to start to deform the edge and push it over the top of the side of the stone. You can see I'm going around a little bit at a time trying to keep that the exact same angle as I push it over and what this is going to do is going to make a perfect bright cut look around the entire thing. You want it to look clean and smooth and not mish-mashed and you know gross looking. If this piece is polished that matters a whole lot more. This particular one I'm going to be antiquing it so you're not going to really see that bright cut effect but even still it's a good thing to do every time just to make a nice clean really smooth looking flush set and once we get this set down what we're trying to do is push this sidewall down and over and actually touching the stone. What that's going to do is if the stone is slightly loose it'll tighten it all the way up and there's no way that stone can come out because it's being pushed the sidewall was pushed over the top of it and a good thing to do once you think you've got it all the way in pull the pendant out push the back of the stone with something and make sure it won't come out. If it doesn't come out you're set. All right I hope this was a good really brief overview of flush setting. I know it's kind of hard to see what's going on. I get a lot of questions about it so hopefully this gets a little bit closer so you can understand a little bit better. If you're interested in this pendant check out my website changeyoucanwear.net. They're not on the website but if you want one contact me through there. All right thanks guys.