Hi Jonathan,
thank you so much for commenting about “popping” metal…!…i never knew about that until now!
julie
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To all you injured in the past jewellers and currently now, as in Rob’s case I hope your physical and psychological scars are healing!
As one timid hobbyist jeweller I can only read your stories with horror.
Can I suggest that along with keeping bandaids handy in the studio you also have a box of small Betadine swabs?
Betadine is non stinging iodine and is %100 effective in killing germs. Before undergoing surgery the patient is always liberally swabbed with Betadine.
Give yourself time to heal Rob!
Rosemary / Willie
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Well, I think you win lol. That’s really horrific. I get hurt a lot, and I’m completely unfazed by blood, needles, burns, exposed bone and/or muscle, organs falling out, etc., I grew up on a farm, I’ve seen it all, and as long as I’m still alive and can move, I’m good. But I’ve got two things that send me into instant panic mode, and that’s my eyes and my airway being messed up. I don’t do eyes and airway problems. I will not be handling either of those issues with a single shred of dignity, and I have zero shame, I will absolutely flip out over eyes and throat problems. I’ll be traumatized, everybody in the room will be traumatized, we’re all gonna be taking a trip to the ER after I’m done flailing around wildly and running over everybody in my panic, it’s not going to be pretty, let’s just not do it and say we did.
So I’ve got a question. Why did it pop??? It seems like repairing jewelry is actually more dangerous than making jewelry because you really don’t know what you’re getting yourself into with someone else’s work. My next question would be how you fuse stuff instead of solder it? I’ve actually looked into videos on this and haven’t found any decent ones. The one I did find, he did a very poor job of fusing and didn’t really seem to even know what he was doing well enough to be teaching the technique.
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Dana,
Thank You!!! LOL!!! I compleatly understand, as Jewellers our Eyes are probably our most important Tool, along with our Hands, as we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without both of them… It was truly traumatic and horrifying to me me too, it happened shortly after I turned (20) and the only reason that I didn’t “lose it” was that we were so incredibly busy with the Christmas rush, I really didn’t have time to think about it… Now when I think about it, it gives me the shudders, even after all these years!
Good question, the reason that it Popped was that as a person wears their Band/Rings they are constantly hitting it on things (door knobs & handles, car handles, bumping into things, tools, etc…), pretty much anything hard that it’s hit on, it eventually Hardens/Tempers the Gold over time, thus creating Tension… So, when you put Heat on it, the Gold Expands a bit (I like to say that it tries to “straighten itself out” from all the hits - think of it this way, when you hit a piece of curved stock with a Hammer, the Metal will often start to “straighten” instead of keeping it’s curve), creating Pressure or even More Tension and before it reaches Annealing Temperature, if there is a Weak Spot (ie: a Soldered Joint or Crack) that Area will give way a Break or Pop in the Case of a Soldered Joint, since the Heat will have Softened/Melted the Solder to the point that it Loosens and the Tension “Pops” the Loosened Piece away…
Fusing is actually very simple, it just a fine line that you have to Master that is just in between Annealing and Melting the Metal… For a quick Technique before I have to go to Work:
Take (2) Pieces of Square or Round Stock and File/Sand the Ends Flat and Brush them off, then put one of them into a Third Hand with the Filed/Sanded End Facing Up, take the other one and put it into a pair of Cross-Lock Tweezers with Heat-Proof Grips with the Filed/Sanded Edge Facing Down, then you will Apply Boric Acid, Fire it and then Flux, Fire it and then while Holding the piece in the Cross-Lock Tweezers Very Close the one in the Third Hand, start to Heat them up Together, one the Flux Melts Off and the Metal is getting to the Annealing Point, Hold the (2) Pieces Together and keep Heating them up until they Melt Into Each Other - this will usually Happen Pretty Quickly after you Reach the Annealing Point (like I said, it’s a “Fine Line” in between Annealing and Melting), so you Must Pay Attention, as once they Fuse/Melt Together, you Need to get the Flame Off right away, otherwise the (2) Ends will Melt into a “Blob” of Metal… Quench it and then Look it over, if it’s a Good Fuse, it will be As Strong as the (2) Pieces before they were Cut Apart… I hope this helps…
Now off to Work…
Jonathan
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Very good point. I thought i was alone in my injuries. Im pretty careful, but im seeing its unavoidable. I try doing these tictok videos and constantly have to say “please ignore my hands”. Lol
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Jonathan,
That’s horrible!! Are you okay now? I sure hope so!
Jeff
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I suppose it’s good to add at this point in the thread, that I’m really big on wearing safety glasses. I strive to wear them always, even if I’m wearing an optivisor. I’ve got prescription safety glasses, which helps encourage me to wear them, because I can actually see things.
Zenni Optical has amazingly inexpensive, but decent quality safety and regular glasses. (for those like me who require bifocals!)
Another option are magnifying safety glasses. I’ve tried a number of them, but I think these from McMaster Carr are my favorites.
After reading all of these stories, I realize that I’m lucky! I’ve only had to go to emergency room twice in the past decades. Once when I was 20ish and cut my finger by a piece of spinning metal in a drill press. The other time, about 10 years ago I was cutting some steel and using a #4 jeweler’s saw blade. The blade broke on the downward stroke and went about an inch into my finger. The folks at the emergency room were very impressed.
Be safe everyone!!
Jeff
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Jeff,
Thank You, yes sir, I’m perfectly ffine, both eyes work great, thpugh they are getting a little bit weaker every year… 
Anyway, that happened (36) years ago when I was (20), the crazy thing was though, before it happened I was Right Eye Dominant and after the bandage came off, I was Left Eye Dominant - The Gold Burned my Left Eye… The Human Body is an amazingly complex organism… (shaking my head)
I wholeheartedlly agree with you about Safety Glasses, Everyone Should Wear Them! I do have to admit though, that even after that accident, the only times that wear them is when I’m using Wire Brushes or an Angle Grinder, otherwise my Optivisor is the only thing that I have for “protection” - I guess I would call it “stubborn stupidity”…
I will definitely look into your suggestions though, thank you!
Jonathan
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I wear a full face shield when I am polishing and grinding. I don’t even know it’s there most of the time and will walk upstairs with it on, only to be told to go down and take it off. Otherwise I wear my own trifocal glasses and an optivisor. I am looking at a pair of prescription magnifiers…Rob
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Wait wait wait, getting your left eye burned actually IMPROVED your vision in that eye??? So basically you just did lasik surgery on yourself and it made your vision better! That’s wild. I mean, what are the chances?! You essentially got free lasik surgery on one eye!! I think I’d still rather go to a doctor to get lasik surgery done, I mean at least they numb you up first…
I’m officially fusing stuff as often as possible now!!! I actually didn’t realize that’s how you fused stuff because after reading this I realized I’ve accidentally fused some stuff a couple of times. I have to practice this, seems like it creates a much more superior bond than soldering.
Jeff- ok I have to get some prescription safety glasses. I hate wearing safety glasses because they cloud up, especially if you’re also wearing a mask so you’re not inhaling metal dust, it absolutely sucks, they’re uncomfortable. Where do you get your prescription safety glasses from? I’m going online hunting as soon as I post this, I need these things. Do they make some that will actually seal around your eyes and not fog up? What freaks me out even more than metal dust is fiberglass. Like those fiberglass pens? I don’t understand people who can pick those things up and just use them. I keep those things in a sealed bag, and if I use them I’m wearing gloves, a mask, and safety goggles. The only reason I don’t put on a HAZMAT suit to use fiberglass is because I don’t have one. I’m terrified of fiberglass probably more than I am molten metal, that stuff is no joke. I need to invest in a face shield that’ll also cover my throat, I’ve had a box full of steel brushes I need to use on a wire mold for months now and haven’t been able to use them because I still don’t have a full face/throat shield.
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Zenni.com has the best deals on prescription glasses that I can find. Zenni has both prescription safety glasses and regular glasses.
One very important thing to note. Safety glasses only help. No safety glasses offer complete protection from all possible harm. The two people that I know who got permanent eye damage at work, were wearing safety glasses. A tiny, little fleck of something sharp (one a piece of metal, the other a piece of silica sand) went underneath their glasses into their eyes. We all have to be vigilant and do our best to outwit the many possible ways that we can be injured while making stuff.
As far as safety glasses fogging up while wearing a mask, one small perk of the pandemic, is there is a lot of advice on the internet on how to keep your glasses from fogging up while wearing a mask.
Like I said, what I like the most about prescription safety glasses is that it encourages me to wear them, because I see better with them than I do without them.
Jeff
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While Zenni.com has great deals, any place that sells prescription glasses can sell prescription safety glasses. They’re pretty much everywhere including through your eye doctor.
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Dana,
LOL!!! Thank you! You made my day today! Yeah, I think that I would rather of had them Numb me up first too!
Great! Yes, Fusing isn’t really that difficult, you just have to Pay Attention to what the Metal is doing a little more while the Flame is on it and yes it is definitely a much stronger bond…
Many years ago, we had a Trade Customer (a Jewellery Store down at the Lake of the Ozarks, MO) who always Soldered all of his Ring Sizings with Easy Solder (The Absolute Worst Solder To Solder A Ring Sizing With!), so typically within a month of him “sizing” one of his customer’s rings, we would receive the ring to Repair it since his customer was so mad about it! Eventually, he ended up just sending all or most of his ring sizings to us to do and then he had much happier customers! 
The worst thing about how he would “size” his rings, other than using Easy Solder, is that he wouldn’t file or sand off the excess solder, her would just Polish the soldered ring and send it on it’s way, ugly solder bump and all! (shaking my head) I never could understand how or why his customers would even accept receiving their rings back like that, but they did… I actually tried to show him How to Fuse a ring sizing together, hoping that he would quit soldering them, but he just watched me do it and said thank you and continued to solder his ring sizings and we continued to repair them for him… 
But, that’s not even the very worst kind of “repair” that he did, he also tried his hand at “repairing” chains and in particular Herringbone Chains… He would take the broken chain and clip off the broken Links down to a relatively straight line, then he would Lay one section about 1/4" over ON TOP of the other section and Easy Solder them together, then polish it up and send it on it’s way! (shaking my head) He actually got away with doing this and his customers accepted it, well, until they didn’t and returned them wanting a refund or for it to be repaired correctly, which is where we came in! (shaking my head)
This Jewellery Store has been in business a very long time and is still open and I’m assuming still doing their “repairs” the same way, the Owner is an older man and has had no Training in Jewellery Work, but decided that he owned a Jewellery Store and so he was a “Jeweller”! Anyway…
I am not trying to denigrate this gentleman or his store, I am just pointing out that there is a right way, well many right ways and a wrong way to do what we do and it is very important to be willing to Learn How to do things correctly, otherwise your work will suffer and so will your customers. That is one of the many reasons that I am So Grateful that we have this Forum, Ganoksin, this is a place to Ask Questions and Learn from Jewellers and Artists who have been Working in the Trade or Producing their Art for many years and are willing to help Future Jewellers and Artists to be the best that they can be! This is also a place for us “Old Timers” to Learn New Techniques and Ideas from each other and from new Jewellers and Artists who are Experimenting and asking Questions that we never even thought to ask, I personally have Learned a Very Great Deal since I’ve joined and Learn something new almost every single day!
So Thank You Ganoksin Community, I Am So Proud To Be Apart Of You!!!
Jonathan
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I had no idea i can get prescription safety glasses! I struggle with mine w safety glasses over them.
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Yes Jonathan! I feel the same way. I feel very blessed to have access to so many doing it for so long and its such a community. Its so differently from when i went into the music business 25 to 30 years ago. I dont get mansplained as they call it like i did then. Its such a great community.
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I use Dewalt safety goggles and they work well over my eyeglasses, but not if you need to wear an Optivsor too.
They fully seal around your eyes so there are no gaps for flying bits. If you wear glasses, put the glasses in the goggles first, then put both on - much easier that way.
You can find them on Amazon, $12-$15. A link to them did not work here for some reason.
Neil A
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Thanks for bringing that up Neil A! You are correct safety goggles offer more eye protection than most safety glasses.
That’s great that you found some eye protection that fits over your glasses!
Those Dewalt goggles look like they’re well made. Are they comfortable too?
Jeff
Jeff
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My progressive medical condition, along with age (sigh) has made working in the studio a lot more hazardous. My brain seems to shut off at any given moment or go “on vacation” and I completely gap routine safety measures like “don’t use your hands to move a freshly annealed piece of metal Sonja!”. Having been an Occupational Health and Safety Officer in a previous life I should also know better, so I am back to Job Safety Plans for everything. PPE is on before I start handling anything that could involve projectile pieces of anything; pliers stand in for hands where possible, Jett Sett creates additional holding tools that pliers can’t accomplish, all tools are in clean/operating condition ready and available at hand, equipment is functioning, etc. etc. JSP’s work in much more dangerous and hazardous occupations and yes, they can be a nuisance, but a good review of the steps and recognizing the potential hazards in the steps and mitigation can go a long way. I stopped using bandaids and crazy glue for cuts even though they are both effective, my latest thing is STAY or QUICK BLOOD STOPPER which I use when I’m trimming my parrots toenails and I accidentally cut too close to the quick. Nothing is more terrifying than a bleeding parrot toenail or broken blood feather which can lead to the bird’s death very quickly through blood loss and this stuff congeals the blood instantly and is less bothersome than trying to find a bandaid or waiting for the super glue to dry and not glue your fingers together in the process. Happy, healing thoughts of resilience that keeps us going forward through it all!
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Jeff, the goggles are reasonably comfortable. Possibly more than one might expect.
There is a bit of weight to them and of course an Optivisor can’t be used with them.
I’m much more likely to use them when using a table saw or circular saw for woodwork due to all the dust that gets kicked up. I wear a face shield at the buffing wheel.
I really need my Optivisors, #7 and #10, so don’t use the Dewalt very often for jewelry work. For better or worse I count on my aviator-style eyeglasses much of the time. My posting about the Dewalt goggles was more to Dana’s and Jonathan’s points about having full-around eye protection. They are great if you don’t need an Optivisor.
Neil A
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Jonathan- I honestly think I was destined to be born in this era of the world specifically because of the internet. I’m intensely curious and demanding about finding answers, I can’t even imagine the amount of leg work and traveling I would have had to do in the Dark Ages hunting people down wanting to know random information they possessed. Plus I’m female so I probably would’ve be burned at the stake for it. Google, Ganoksin, and not living in the Dark Ages make my life 10000 times easier. I wonder if the jeweler you mentioned who always used easy solder on repairs just genuinely hated doing that particular task and did it badly on purpose so people would stop bringing him those jobs lol. I personally don’t want to do repair jobs because I would be freaking out the entire time. It’s one thing to melt your own work, it’s quite another thing to melt someone else’s and then have to have a really uncomfortable conversation with an angry customer. I do, however, want to know all about how to repair jewelry because that knowledge puts you in the position of creating superior pieces less likely to need repairs. It would be awesome if one of these days you ever made a series of videos or wrote a book to share all of your knowledge about repairing jewelry and creating pieces that are superior and will hold up to the test of time. I know you’re sick to death of the topic, but the idea of such expert knowledge being lost is heartbreaking to me. You’re the only jeweler I’ve heard so far talk about fusing as opposed to soldering unless you just have no choice, which means you’re probably better at fusing than 99.999% of jewelers out there and have a lot of knowledge on it. I can’t even find a decent video on how to fuse jump rings well so finding a decent video on how to fuse something more complex and tricky is just impossible. And that’s just one topic, think of all the other stuff you know. And now that you’re making and applying that knowledge to your own creations? Your best work is definitely yet to come.
There are a couple of people on YouTube who post smithing videos all the time, their accounts are monetized, they make quite a lot of money, and because they’re making videos and have lots of followers, companies big and small are constantly sending them the best and most expensive jeweler equipment on the market for free just so they’ll use it in their videos and talk about it because it’s basically cheap advertisement for them. The thing that absolutely kills me is that these couple of people I’m talking about are only hobbyists, they’re not very good at it, and they really don’t know that much. Yet they get free equipment and money every time someone watches one of their videos, and they have tons of followers. Most professional jewelers and goldsmiths are really quite secretive and don’t want to share their knowledge and techniques with the whole world. Which means anyone out there who wants to know this stuff has to rely on inexperienced hobbyists who really don’t know that much, and these inexperienced hobbyists who do post videos make out like bandits. There are a few real goldsmiths who have YouTube channels or offer training on their own websites, of course, but by and large the guys who know the most don’t share it freely. In the days before internet, that approach made sense because you didn’t want anyone stealing your secrets and becoming your competition (there weren’t really many customers, your customers were really mostly only the upper class, peasants couldn’t afford fancy jewelry, so having competition was a very valid concern), and you couldn’t accurately charge money or get paid well to teach whereas now you can because of the internet. Even the fear of your secrets being stolen, I mean everything is made by machines now; if your techniques require things to be handmade you don’t have anything to worry about, there are intellectual property rights now, and nearly everyone now is a consumer and can purchase jewelry so competition isn’t really a problem because there are more than enough customers to go around. Plus, I don’t know about you guys, but everyone I know is too busy looking at Facebook to actually create or make anything. I don’t know anyone except people from the older generations who actually work with their hands anymore, and that’s an even bigger problem with my generation and younger. I don’t think anybody has to worry about techniques being stolen, nobody knows how to do anything anymore, and they don’t seem particularly interested in learning, which is actually really depressing to me, but that’s a different tangent. Yet the secretive attitude is deeply embedded in the craft. I honestly hope that changes. Like me for instance, I’m more than willing to pay for the knowledge, but I’m unable to do a traditional apprenticeship and go to a shop every day and learn that way. Which leaves me stuck resorting to just whatever books or videos others have made. And I honestly worry about knowledge being lost. How many things have different people known or experienced over the history of the human race that is now just gone and lost to us? I can’t even imagine. If I could convince everyone on Ganoksin to write a digital book or make videos about everything they know, I would consider my life to have been wildly successful lol.
Neil- those are the ones I have! I love them except that you can’t use them under an Optivisor, that’s their only draw back. I think if I get some prescription safety goggles I’ll be more inclined to wear them. I need some goggles that are prescription and will actually fit under the Optivisor. Do they make anything like that?
Sonja- That’s really scary, if I became more absentminded than I already am, I would be downright dangerous to even be around. I don’t say that jokingly, I’m dead serious, the idea actually frightens me. I will use that styptic powder stuff if I have a wound that just won’t stop gushing. I don’t even mind that it’s painful, but I’ve noticed that whenever you use that stuff on a wound, the wound heals more slowly and scars worse. Which, I mean, if you’re bleeding to death a scar is the least of your problems so there’s that.
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