My first riveting experience

Just thought will share my experience with the forum. Am ready for
criticism:)

My first riveting experience

Being totally new to silversmithing, I have always thought that
soldering was the easiest method for connecting two pieces. Today I
thought I will try riveting and the first attempt was a disaster. I
could not create the blob at the end of the wire, then when I was
hammering the rivet on the top, the wire at the bottom bent too much
and finally came off. I was losing my patience and thought will do
soldering. I was more confident in soldering. Experts please forgive
me when I say I am confident. Basically I wanted to connect two
pieces of flower. I almost gave up and thought will do soldering in
the middle. Then I thought sometime in my silversmithing career I
need to do this, so why not now? Tried again and succeeded. I
actually want to block the bottom one too, but the stem looked nice
so just soldered from behind. But with the top rivet itself the
pieces were secure. Believe me, I checked.

I know that the piece is not very neat. But I was so impatient to
try the rivet, that I just went on did that.

Thanks.
Regards,
Kavitha Balakrishnan.

Here’s a link to a tutorial that has close up pictures of making wire
rivets:

http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep80r8 [PDF file]

I think tube rivets are much easier for beginners, you might try
those.

Another key is making sure that your wire is not too long. One
teacher I had said that the wire should be the thickness of the
metal to be joined + 2 mm. That’s 1 mm per side.

Elaine