Bezels & ACS

[nojee]

Hello, I have never worked with ACS but was wondering if this would work well for making custom bezels for odd shaped stones, porcelailn, or glass for pendants? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you

[cwolf]

Art Clay might shrink to much. If you can investment cast you can vac-u-form a piece of plastic around an irregular shape to make a bezel. You vac-u-form the shape, cut the excess plastic from the plastic bezel, sprue and cast. You have your irregular shaped bezel.

[nojee]

Cwolf, thanks for the reply although I have no idea what investment casting is or how to do it.

[Metalman]

The best way to make a bezel with Art Clay Silver is to use fine silver bezel wire and the ACS Oil Paste to join it.  This works great, you can torch fire it rather then using the kiln but your torch control must be very good because the bezel wire is so thin that it is easy to over heat it.
The bezel wire will not shrink because it is not ACS. If you are mounting this bezel into an ACS piece, you will need to account for the 8 to 10% shrinkage. The way i work is to make up the bezel first [slightly enlarged], fire it , clean it up and then build it into my Art Clay piece. Fire again and do the clean up for any cracks, etc and do my final firing.  All these firings do not hurt the metal clay - just get the piece to how you want it.
Cwolf has got the details on tradition casting methods - great way to go if you have access to the tools, the tech and the equipment.  Also very good for production work - meaning if you are going to make multiple of a particular design.  I feel that for the one off designwork - the metal clays are a great way to go.

[Metalman]

From Nojee
Metalman, thank you for your answer on using the ACS paste and bezel wire for making my custom bezels. I want to use this for making bezels around broken china pieces. They would be up to 1/4 in. thick. Also thanks for the info on the book. Can the silver be painted in any way to give it an antiquish brass looking finish?
Nojee- 2 things:
1] You can use Liver of sulfur to color the silver. If you experiment with the chemical bath and stopping the patina reaction in plain water, you can get an antiquey looking yellow color.

2] If you are willing to risk your china pieces by firing them, you can use Art Clay 650 Overlay paste directly on to you work. Then you can build up the art clay on the 'footing' you have created with the overlay paste. Very Cool! You will be firing at about 1200° F and you may have to do this several times to get it perfect
Metalman

[Metalman]

Thanks Metalhead,
Okay, I will run a few details.
1]  You can torch fire up to about 25 gms of Art Clay Silver.  25 grams makes a pretty good size piece.  If you get some fine silver bezel wire, you can make your bezels and fire them right in.  
2]  If you prefer, you can hard solder the Art Clay - I usually do a little pre soldering because the metal clay is porous and really sucks up the solder, but soldering works fine.
3]  If you have Cubic Zirconium stones - those can be fired directly into the clay with the torch - take it a little cautious on the heat up.
4]  If you have natural stones, you can test fire them in a kiln [1472F - 30 min] - this puts them at risk, but if they survive, you can build them right into a piece and fire them in.  You probably need to fire this sort of thing in a kiln.
Last note:  There are a lot of experimental things to be done. These are new materials. I will tell you all I can but some of the time you are going to go into the experimentiverse.  
Report back on how it goes out there,
Inquiring minds want to know.
Hope this helps

[Metalhead]

Hi Metalman - the projects I want to make are just simple pieces of jewelry, including pendants and rings. I wanted to make pieces with bezel-set semi-precious stones in them. Should I attach the bezel before I fire the clay, or can I solder the bezel after the piece has been fired? Can I use hard or IT solder? Thanks for the info.

yumi