Yep, Jane. It’s harder than it looks. Just keep after it and
remember that each step depends on the accuracy of the step before
it. Leave your center lines until the last possible moment. Once
they’re gone, keeping things straight and symmetrical can be tough.
80% of the hard stuff (and time) is in the details. It’s usually
those last little detail steps that separate an OK wax from a really
good one and they save a lot of time in finishing (carving metal is
harder than carving wax). It is easy to make things too heavy, a very
common newbie error. Wax is a lot lighter than metal and what looks
border-line too thin in the wax often ends up being too thick in the
metal. Measure, measure, measure! If you find you need to do
substantial building up because of an error, start over. Once you
start adding a lot, you lose reference and it usually is almost
impossible to recover and keep symmetry.
A great starting project is a plain oval top signet ring.
Deceptively simple in appearance, it can really challenge your skills
in keeping everything straight, level and symmetrical. Quite often,
the simpler it looks the harder it is to do well. Anyone can make
asymmetrical stuff. A well balanced signet ring with identical
shoulders - both in shape and thickness, a level, evenly shaped and
centered top, and a perfectly perpendicular shank with smooth,
symmetrical curves in the north - south sides with a constant
thickness and edge width is tough. When you can carve a nice signet
ring and get it right first try, you are ready to branch off into
almost anything. It makes a great bench test wax.
A Dremel tool, flexshaft or high-speed handpiece definitely speeds
things up, but it’s not entirely necessary, and then you also have to
have burs, so it can all add up to a sizable investment pretty
quickly.
An alcohol lamp and dental tools work OK (used them for years) but
it’s hard to identify when the temperature is just right. When you do
finally figure it out, it stays there for only a second or two.
Re-carving wax that was over-heated while building up can be
challenging (it changes the consistency), and it’s hard to build up
using lamp tools without getting bubbles. You don’t NEED a wax pen,
but it sure helps if you need to repair or build up a screw-up.
It’s also very useful for melting stones in without worrying about
overheating them (it’s very easy to fracture a stone with an alcohol
lamp and tools). Be careful when trying this, not all stones can deal
with it, even when heated up slowly using a wax pen. It’s also very
easy to scratch a stone with either method. But a melted-in setting
sure helps at stone setting time, especially with fancy cuts.
Molds are usually made from a metal master and unless you are going
to be doing production, I would recommend that you don’t mess with
that yet. Molds can be made using room temperature vulcanizing
rubber, so a vulcanizer isn’t required at all anymore. The frames for
RTV are pretty cheap, a lot cheaper than a vulcanizer and frames. You
can even make molds of waxes using RTV rubber. If you are thinking
you have to make a mold to cast, you don’t. Get the book “Centrifugal
or Lost Wax Jewelry Casting” by Murray Bovin. It’s a little dated,
but it has all the info you will need to understand and do successful
castings.
You might want to try a stiffer wax, either blue or green. The
purple is really flexible, gummy and difficult to get sharp detail
with, but forgiving of dropping and rough handling. Blue is a good
middle of the road wax and is what I use most often. Green is great
for detail and sharp, crisp edges, but it’s kind of brittle and
breaks easily, especially in thin cross sections. I prefer Ferris wax
over Matt wax. Kate Wolf has a wax that is brown/tan in color that
carves really nicely, but I find it very hard to see what I’m doing
with it. She also has some really nice wax tools that some people
swear by. I don’t use them though. A sizing reamer, dividers, a good
machinist’s square, a mold knife, a few files, a couple of flat and
onglette gravers and pieces of broken saw blades chucked up in an
Exacto handle is pretty much all I’ve ever needed. I’ve found that
many people with a lot of tools are trying to substitute skill with
cool tools. It doesn’t work though.
Stay with it. The best news is that wax is pretty cheap, so don’t
worry about messing up. If you get lost or lose your lines, just
toss it on a back corner of your bench, cut off a new hunk and start
over. The next attempt will be better, the one after that will be
even better. I have a wax carving demo on my website that you might
find helpful. It’s under Our Blog at
http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/vy
It’s not a signet ring, but just about everything required for a
signet ring went into it and it follows the same sequence of steps
(almost all of my waxes do). Some of the verbiage isn’t quite right,
our web guy wrote it and I just never have gotten around to editing
it.
Happy carving!
Dave Phelps
precisionplatinumjewelry.com
