Bench Tips for Jewelry Making - 101 Useful Tips From Brad Smith
A New Book Sharing Validated Methods to Improve Jewelry Making
Skills for Beginners and Professionals October 25, 2012. A new book
debut by a seventeen-year professional Southern California jewelry
artisan/instructor, BenchTips for Jewelry Making-101 Useful Tips
from Brad Smith contains some of the most useful, safe, and
productive ways to work smarter at the bench - techniques proven to
be among the “best practices” for improving quality and saving time.
This collection of bench tips covers twentythree ways to save time
in soldering and polishing; eight tips to avoid common safety
hazards; inexpensive ways to make your own equipment; the
“Must-Have” tools for increasing productivity; ten tips to make
stone setting easier, as well as many others. Priced at $16.95,
Bench Tips for Jewelry Making: 101 Useful Tips from Brad Smith is
currently available on Amazon.com.
These tips come from Smith.s years of experience in the jewelry
industry, including a decade teaching hundreds of students. He
started nearly twenty years ago as an amateur rockhound collecting
specimens, but he didn.t know how to do the metalwork to show off the
jaspers, petrified woods, and opals he cut and polished. Through
classes and Internet tutorials he learned silver fabrication and
fashioned those stones into finished jewelry. With his extensive
background in shop methods and his enthusiasm to share knowledge, he
quickly began teaching these techniques and sharing his tips with
others.
Brad has put together valuable on bench tips that will
make your jewelry making most enjoyable! remarked Anthony L. Chavez,
former LAUSD Adult Instructor in Jewelry Making and Lapidary. This
book is like having a qualified jeweler looking over your shoulder.
A past instructor of Beginning Jewelry at Idyllwild School of The
Arts, and currently Manager of Bourget Flagstone Co. in Santa Monica,
California, Chavez, credits Smith with putting together invaluable
for beginning and advanced jewelers in BenchTips for
Jewelry Making-101 Useful Tips from Brad Smith.
A studio jeweler, lapidary, and jewelry instructor, Brad Smith is
based in Santa Monica, California. He enjoys working with silver,
gold, exotic woods, bone, fossil ivory and meteorite. A long-time
member of the Culver City Rock Club, Smith has taught lapidary
skills, led field trips, organized gem and mineral shows, and served
as Club President. He is a member and former Vice President of the
Metal Arts Society of Southern California. After teaching Advanced
Jewelry in the Los Angeles School District for eight years, Smith
now holds classes at the Santa Monica Adult-Education Center. He also
moderates several discussion groups on the Internet including the
popular LA-Rocks for mineral collecting and the BenchTips page on
Facebook that includes members from twenty-three countries.