[New Book] Jewelry Metals by James Binnion

Jewelry Discussion
1

Jewelry Metals - A Guide to Working with Common Alloys
Technical Editor: James Binnion
Price: $34.95
https://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep81uu
…

This practical guide from MJSA Press offers expert insights into all
aspects of working with precious and non-precious jewelry metals.
Have the characteristics of common alloys always at hand, plus
advice for easier casting and bench work, tips for managing scrap
metal, international marking and stamping regulations, and
illustrated step-by-step instruction on a range of metalworking
techniques, including mokume gane, granulation, chasing, and
anticlastic forming. The book to help you make the most of your
metals .

Jewelry Metals Includes:

General characteristics of common alloying metals. Insights into
casting gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, including issues with
gas porosity, fluidity, shrinkage porosity, and quenching. Guidelines
for fabricating jewelry from the four precious metals, including
issues with malleability and ductility, annealing, hot and cold
joining, setting, and finishing.

How to best work with common non-precious jewelry metals: aluminum,
brass, bronze, cobalt-chrome, copper, niobium, stainless steel, and
titanium.

Step-by-step demonstrations of the following metals techniques:
anodizing, anticlastic forming, chasing and repousse, granulation,
keum-boo, mokum=E9 gane, and silver oxidation.

How to best collect waste metal and maximize refining returns.
Federal Trade Commission guidelines for marking, stamping, promoting
alloys, and an overview of legal regulations addressing the use of
lead, cadmium, and nickel in jewelry.

2

Hi folks, I wanted to share that I have recently had the pleasure of
being the Technical Editor of new book for MJSA titled

Jewelry Metals- A Guide to Working with Common Alloys

“This practical guide from MJSA Press offers expert insights into all
aspects of working with precious and non-precious jewelry metals.
Have the characteristics of common alloys always at hand, plus advice
for easier casting and bench work, tips for managing scrap metal,
international marking and stamping regulations, and illustrated
step-by-step instruction on a range of metalworking techniques,
including mokume gane, granulation, chasing, and anticlastic forming.
The book to help you make the most of your metals.”

This is intended as a studio guide to provide an overview of common
jewelry alloys and their components along with some technique
overviews from some very talented contributors.

You can find it here http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep81uu

Jim

3

Jim Binnion’s New Book, Wow!

Hi All Orchidians,

Years ago I reviewed Brepohl’s wonderful metallurgy book (translated
by Charle Lewton-Brain and published by Brynmorgen) for Lapidary
Journal. It’s a remarkable reference tool, but rather unwieldy for
benchtop use. I want to briefly review a new book here, because I am
so impressed with it.

Jim Binnion as Technical Editor, has compiled a truly practical
volume, “Jewelry Metals; A Guide to Working with Common Alloys”, and
my copy arrived in the mail yesterday. It’s the perfect benchtop
manual, when instant on jewelry metals (gold, silver,
platinum, palladium, and nonprecious metals) is needed. It’s the
latest volume from MJSA Press, and, I think, one of the most useful
for studio and bench jewelers alike.

The step by step section is populated with jewelers who have
developed expertise in the techniques they demonstrate (Jayne
Redman, Michael Good, Cindy Eid, Valentin Yotkov, Jim himself, and
more). A clear Table of Contents plus a thorough (and most useful)
Index are included. Jim has also taken the time to generously list
his consultants for each topic and also offers a substantial listing
of resources.

A caveat. I am not associated with MJSA and make no profits from
this book or this review.

As an aside from this review, what I really feel is lacking on my
bookshelf (and yours, too, I bet) is a truly COMPLETE volume on
soldering/brazing/welding for jewelers: including intimate and
thorough on the types, care of and feeding of torches
(tanks, tips, gasses); options for soldering stations; the range of
tools and equipment; ventilation; solders; tips and techniques;
fluxes; binding /jigs; pickles. There are number of books on
soldering out there, but, having looked them over, none of them
really do it for me.Come on Brian or Charles or Karen or Jim or
Cindy or all of the above, let’s do the one volume that will knock
all the other almost complete and mostly incomplete ones out of the
water! Anyone else want to jump in?

http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep81uu

'nuf said,
Linda Kaye-Moses

4

A truly complete volume on soldering (etc.)?

...As an aside from this review, what I really feel is lacking on
my bookshelf (and yours, too, I bet) is a truly COMPLETE volume on
soldering/brazing/welding for jewelers: including intimate and
thorough on the types, care of and feeding of torches
(tanks, tips, gasses); options for soldering stations; the range
of...

Thank you for the new book, James Binnion, and for the review, Linda
Kaye-Moses. But Linda’s wish for a volume she describes (above),
strikes me as a wonderful but almost impossible idea. There are so
many different and opposing ideas on each of these areas (the recent
Orchid discussion of various views on using Tarn-X is one small
example) that such a volume would be either huge or woefully
incomplete. Many times over the past 40 years, I have read articles
in which the metals I enjoy, work with, and sell as jewelry (brass,
copper, nickel-silver) have been briefly dismissed as not being
jewelry metals. This attitude has slowly begun to change, but I
think we can all think of additional problems for putting out such a
volume.

However, if someone takes on the task, I’ll be happy to review the
sections on the three base metals with which I’m familiar. I have
written several (published) articles and book reviews (some on
metalworking in the Ancient Near East) in the past, and enjoy doing
that.

Judy Bjorkman