... Since the setting is double the thickness around the
stone, I have a wee problem rolling the bezel over,
Before the relatively recent developement of hammer handpieces
(not to mention electric flex shafts…), the tool of choice for
such a task would be a chasing tool driven with a small chasing
hammer. If the bezel is suffiently exposed to access, you can
even use just a riveting hammer, without the chasing tool/punch,
but the chasing tool will give you better control.
not to mention that until I can get it started the stinking
stone slides around like it has a life of its own.
What kind of seat did you cut for the stone? A properly cut
seat, even for a bezel, should be a pretty snug fit. The stone
isn’t supposed to be able to slop around like that. When it
does, it only means that you’ll have a harder time keeping it
level as you tighten it, and you’ll have to move a whole lot
more metal over the stone to get it tight. But once you’ve got a
sloppy seat to deal with, you can at least solve that aspect of
it by taking a bit of the red boxing wax (sticky, soft red wax,
pliable at room temp, smearing a bit of it over the stone and
bezel inside edge both, so it’s now holding the stone in. Don’t
use very much. This alone would work, but is messy and it’s hard
to see what’s going on, so now take a tiny torch flame and just
brush the stone and setting with it to melt that wax. It will
run down around the girdle and under the stone, making the stone
nicely visible again, while also sticking the thing into position
pretty well. Before you get the stone quite completely tight,
you may in some cases want to steam or boil the wax back out
again, allowing the stoch to jiggle a little while you tighten
the metal. That allows you to detect the point at which the
stone is held tight (it stops jiggling) without going too far and
putting stress on the stone.
Since this is an open backed setting about 10mm across and
5mm deep, using stone setting pliers is out of the question
without crushing the outer shell. And, no, I don't have a
hammer handpiece for my flex shaft. Anyone got any ideas before
I lose my mind and make permanent indentations in my fingers
from trying to hang onto this sucker?
One thing to keep in mind as well, when the bezel is thick
enough that you cannot just “fold” it over the stone, is that the
direction of pressure from the hammered punch changes. You are
not hammering the bezel toward the center axis of the stone from
the side in, as you’d do if you were just pushing a soft bezel
with a burnisher or the like. What you’re doing is pushing the
bezel almost but not quite straight down along the plane of the
bezel wall, only slightly angling the pressure to the stone. The
bezel is being compressed and thickened by this, not bent. It
will build up a burr towards the inside as it compresses, and
this edge growing inward is what will hold the stone. Use very
gentle small hammer blows once the bulk of the metal has been
moved mostly to where it needs to be. Once the stone just barely
stops jiggling, but not quite, you then can switch to a burnisher
(a pro would keep right on going, with his/her hammer handpiece
or punch, but it takes some practice to do this without danger to
the stone, so initially, I’d recommend putting the hammer down
before the stone is absolutely tight) The burnisher is then used
in the same direction of pressure, straight down on that inner
edge, folding it further down toward the stone, forming a
reflector angle. As you work that edge down, the metal has to
go somewhere, and it’s lower edge will work itself even more over
the stone. The final step is simply working the burnisher around
that inside reflector angle until the metal is tight to the stone
and even. Any unevenness can now be cleaned up with a well
polished flat graver. Once that is done, you file off the
excess metal that is on the outside edge of the bezel, some of
which will have spread even outwards from the plane of the bezel
wall. When you’ve done that, it will look as though the edge had
been “folded” inwards, instead of the vertical compression you
actually caused.
Oh, and did I forget to mention, during ALL of this, the bezel
is firmly imbedded in shellac on a stick or block of wood you can
hold in a vise, engravers ball, or whatever you choose that
leaves your hands free to work the tools. The engravers ball is
the best, but you can improvise other things. Only that final
emery/file trimming of the outside of the bezel is done after
it’s been cleaned up from the shellac.
You’ll find that with practice, you can set this way only
slightly slower than with a hammer handpiece, and some setters
prefer this manual method for exceptionally fragile stones, as
each individual impact is precisely controllable, where hammer
handpieces tend to run away from ya sometimes. The big advantage
of a hammer handpiece, aside from speed, is that you need only
one hand for it, leaving the other free to hold the work in a
ring clamp or whatever, so you don’t need the seperate engravers
ball to hold the work. You sacrifice some control, but gain back
that two handed operation if you skip the punch and work directly
with the hammer face. But you have to be very careful where and
how you’re hitting, and you cannot switch to a tiny punch to
work small amounts of metal as precisely…
Hoping to hear some pearls of wisdom from the experts,
Oh, geez. You wanted a real expert… ULP. Well, maybe this
helped anyway. 
Peter Rowe