BenchNews

I can’t stand wearing goggles, or any other kind of eye wear while working at the bench. That fact led me to think of something I learned while attending the Revere Academy. With a lens from some welding goggles and a paper clip you can rig up the little device seen below. Just slide it down toward the gas adjustment valves when not in use, and toward the nozzle when in use, and you have yourself a non intrusive welding eye shield.

If you work in multiple locations like myself, you understand the dynamic of not being able to (or wanting to) have a duplicate of every one of your tools at each location. There just happen to be a pair of dark lenses at 2nd location I work at, and after months of holding one of them in my hand while brazing, it finally dawned on me what I had learned at the academy. I learn by seeing things, so check out the pics



one of the first things we did when I attended the revere Academy in San Fransisco, was make a wood block to hold all of our gravers and other tools. It is one of the simplest and useful things you can have on your bench.

The right tool is 75% of the job, and every now and then there comes a time when you just don’t have the right tool. Thats when you have to make it! Take this 3 prong earring holder. I love the 3 prong look, but they are the hardest damn things to hold.

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In following thru with the effort to document MUCH more of what I do throughout the days and weeks, I turned to one of the best new publications I have seen in quite some time, Make Magazine. With a little inspiration from one of Make’s articles, I constructed this mount for my bench. Now it is a trivial job to photogragh, step by step, all that happens on the business end of my workplace…!

I fianlly got a chance to get back to work with the Unimat, and it performed as expected, perfectly. I tried to reconfigure it without refering to the manual, and it was fairly easy untill the point where I had to think about tooling. That where I had to get creative, but overall it help me out of a bind where I was just not at all sure how to go about a job…I love it.

One of the best bench mods I ever did was to permanently attach my benchmate articulated 3rd hand to my bench. It folds neatly out of the way and is always on call when I need it, without taking up valuable bench top real estate.

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I have seen a lot of these, but this one appears to the most well thought out and documented. With photgraphs of individual parts, the stores they came from, how to do it of course, and all for under a $100. You can link to the full article HERE , or from the image.

I have desperately been needing a pen plater. I had previously purchase one of the disposible ones to try, and found it very lacking in effectiveness. So I finally pony-ed up the $115 to buy the Samson Economy plater from one of our favorite suppliers. I got the plater today and upon inspection noticed that all it is, is a “2 amp regulated dc power supply”. Guess what a google search of that term brings up….
THIS
Nice, huh! Now Im going to opt and get the nice pen and clamp as replacement parts from that very same supplier, but Im sure you could fashion them yourselves. Even with buying the nice attachments Im coming in about 50$ cheaper.
It still blows my mind when I think about companies putting a sticker on another companies product, doubling the price, and calling it there own. Go get your new pen plater now, hell, get 2, at $23 how can you go wrong.

So, i got kind of excited when I ran across THIS post on a major blogging site refering to our trade, or to be more specific, ring cutters. After reading through the article I was struck by the utter lack of any reference to the jewelry trade! You would think after reading it that the only option for removing a ring that you had “outgrown” would be to take a trip to the ER, resulting in 1) a ruined ring or, 2) a missing finger. The article intially caught my attention because I had just commented to a customer that I happened to be removing a ring from, that i have been doing this a lot lately. Which is indeed true, I have cut off more rings in the last 2 months than I have in my entire tenure in the business (does this say anything about the emerging epidemic in our country ;))? Probably not, most cases involved a pregnancy.
The point of my rebuttle though is to say that anybody who finds themselves in need of having a ring removed need look no further than their local jewelry store. I’m quite certain the store would happily remove it for free, but be considerate and leave the item in that store to be put back together in a manner that will enable you to wear it for years to come.
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What, you don’t believe me? How would you like to replace your big smelly oven, your way overpriced timer/ controller, and that vacuum machine with a $75 microwave from Walmart? Well, if you master this, it appears to be entirely possible. So who’s going to try it first? I want to hear about it.