The nickel silver in my mokume has been wearing my bits and burrs out at a spectacular rate.  I wondered if that might be a problem when I saw how resistant the nickel was to the nitric acid that I used as an etching agent.  Glenn has helped me work on sharpening drill bits.  Sharpening burrs is complicated and difficult enough that it isn’t really worth the time and effort.  I am going to have to use nickel more carefully from now on.  I now have 4 burrs that are rather dull.  This could become a giant money sucker if I have to continually by new burrs.

My mother like the etched pendant that I sent to her for mother’s day, and that makes me happy!  The hole for the chain in the second pendant got pretty wonky (as you can see from the pictures).  That was due in part to the dulling action affecting the direction of the burr’s travel.  I am going to work with it some more to make it as presentable as possible.  I still have to set the stones.  I absolutely have to figure out a better way of doing the chain hole, or else an entirely different way of mounting the chain period.  I can’t afford to spend an entire day drilling one hole for each pendant.

Missy was working on a ring with bezel set stones today and we watched her working on the bezels.  The first one went OK.  The two opals on the sides were a little more problematic.  But Missy is a pro and she found ways around the small issues that kept popping up.  She did manage to break 2 opals in the process.  Opals are very fragile, relatively speaking and she had about 2 dozen opals just in case.  In fact, she said she would have been very surprised if she had broken at least one.

This whole day was frustrating for pretty much everyone.  Sherry and I were both dropping things ALL OVER THE PLACE.  I lost 2 sterling bezels that Missy had given me.  The other two are soldered to a piece of copper.  I imagine tomorrow I will try my hand at bezel setting.  Missy also gave me a couple of 3 mm lab created sapphires to put in the bezels.  More on that tomorrow.