Brian. Sorry you have given me the answer I didn’t want to hear,
about the Visors.
Others might like to know that PUCK produced an upgrade of their
"hand piece tip". Now the !! uses the same gas settings as a 3+.
The gas savings are incredible like about 3/4. These tips screw in
and are not push in as with a 3.
Best wishes John S.
Hey John,
Most of my work can be done with the magnifying lamp on a PUCK and I can see that if the shield was on my head band things would be quicker.
Secondly, as I also do clock repair and restoration work, could someone give me a bit of feed back on replacing or building up new leaves in clock pinions with say steel binding wire.
Thirdly, 9 ct. yellow gold can be a "dog" to weld some times, could that be due to the fact that many casters add brass, containing Zinc, to give the metal a richer colour.
I had this very same discussion about this today.
It arose because I had a chance to look at the PUK 4.1 brochure,
some new features, and you can buy components now which is good if
you don’t want a microscope.
If you don’t want a microscope I was discussing what you’d need to
protect your eyes from the flash. There is the magnifying lens as
you said with the darkening feature, but that’s a fixed device. The
auto darkening welding helmets came up in conversation, not magnified
like an optivisor, but a different solution to the problem.
Building up with steel, I’ll have to look into that after April, too
busy moving the store to investigate properly.
As to the alloy, brass in gold. really… yuck (just a personal
bias, pay me no mind). If you have an “iffy” alloy you may have to
play with the settings a little, if you can’t wait until May, maybe
Jeffrey can offer some tips in the meantime.
Regards Charles A.
How about if I start a blog
Make it like this one. CIA
Hi John,
It’s technically feasible to build a shuttered (shielded) optivisor,
but it’ll be wired, and it’ll take some doing.
All you really need to do is get the shutter out of one of the PUK2
magnifying lamp gizmos, and use that. (They were full sized welding
shields, unlike a lot of the later ones.)
I went far enough along the road to doing that that I discovered the
next problem: the connector. Whatever connector Lampert’s using, it
isn’t a standard one, and isn’t one that’s easily available in the
states. Obviously, it’s a metric DIN connector of some type, but
even by taking my existing shutter to a serious Silicon Valley
electronics parts store, we still couldn’t figure out what
connector it was, or where to get more. That’s one of the reasons
I’m suggesting pirating the parts out of an existing setup.
After that, I gave up and bought one of their microscopes. Which
works wonderfully well. Unless you know why you don’t want one,
trust me, just get theirs. Saves much hassle and time you could be
spending making stuff. My reason for the optivisor was that on some
of the hollowware I do, it won’t fit under the scope, so I freehand
some of the welds. It’d be nice not to have to remember to blink.
Regards,
Brian
The recession and us
The recession actually has been a benefit for our jewelry repair
business because we use Modern Jewely Repair Methods with the Pulse
Arc and the Fusion Welder. We can do most jewelry repairs in less
than 15 minutes because we don’t pickle, no preprep, and
firecoat/flux. We do not use a torch at all. We go directly to the
weld and since we only work on small areas of the ring only mm’s
this makes clean up very fast and easy. This also helps the consumer
because the jeweler does not polish the ring for long periods of
time in the buffer wheels. We save 1/2 hours to 2 hours per job.
Sothe customer can wait and shop in our store while their jewelry is
gettingrepaired. Our charges are 1/3 to 1/2 the prices of our
competitors. Customers come from all over the country and also send
their repair business tous. We also provide a wholesale repair
business for other Jewelers.
Another reason our prices are less is because we don’t need to buy
to many parts from findings companies because with Modern Jewelry
Repair we can rebuild the parts and heads that are already there. If
there are soft stones in a ring we use the Sand Hills Gold Gem Guard
to create a heat shield on the soft stones and retip the tips that
need redone. A jeweler will not have to take the stones out to
repair the item. We don’t need sizing stock because we can use scrap
rings or cast our own sizing stock and we use no expensive solder.
Generally we just buy laser wire and other wire inorder to build and
size rings. We are very advanced with this technology and can
actually shape the prong with the welder with very minimal clean up.
We not only can fix fine jewelry but we created a new market and can
fix vintage, classic, costume, native american jewelry, torquoise,
metal eye glasses, medical instruments, guns and gun parts, tea
sets, sterling silver jewelry, some auto parts, boat parts, dental
bridges and the list goes on. So check out this new technology and
its application. We are just touching the surface of this amazing
technology.
Terry R. Reichert
Charles
I did not know about 9k alloys with brass thrown in. Some of the cast
brassfrom Asia and India usually have a tiny percent of lead in them
(1% or under or who knows). If this alloy additive has any percent of
lead, it will make welding pretty dirty and ugly. The modern brass
sheet and wire weld really nicely on either PUK or Orion as long as
you start at low setting and work your way up. One trick I use on
some of these lead bearing cast brass items is fine silver wire as a
filler. It’s not a great color match but usually works as a repair
fill. I have been using 26 to 30 gauge .999 fine silver wire as a
last resort when repairing stubborn unknown alloys. I have
nometalergical findings just got frustrated once and it worked. It is
now mygo-to welding glue. Hope it works on 9k.
Sessin Durgham
Rio Grande