Hi welcome to the online jewellery Academy. I'm Professor John R and I'm your instructor. In a previous video we visited the Monte Cristo trade corporation in the heart of the LA Jewellery District and there we met Greg the resident expert who showed us how Monte Cristo produces gold chains for clients using some very, very interesting machines, but some of you might have noticed that those links in that gold chain were not soldered shut.
Now when you hand make a chain, of course you're going to manipulate things so that every single link is soldered. Well in this video, you're going to see exactly how Monte Cristo solders those links shut, but to clue you in, after that chain is made it’s tumbled with a powder that has a soldering alloy in it. That penetrates the small little cavities in between the elements that are the ends of the chain and then well you'll just have to watch the rest of the video. So let's go and check it out. We're here in the annealing and soldering department and Monte Cristo and I'm with Greg the expert. Greg can you tell me what this big machine is for? This machine here is chiefly to solder solid gold chains that have been made with the machine and basically a soldering up chain goes in one end, after it's been tumbled and packed full of solder, comes out finished on the other end. So let me break this down. So we start with chain from the chain making department. Yeah it then gets tumbled with a powdered alloy that will solder it. Yes and then you feed it through the ovens, and how long does the process take? Well you can run several feet of per minute of gold chain depending on thickness and material. Wow, so you can produce soldered links by the yard for clients. Yes, that is amazing and this works with wire as well for annealing. For annealing wire we'd go over to this machine. This is what we use for all of the most of the annealing. I should say and this is a perfect environment inside here with no oxygen or contamination and it gets up to whatever temperature we pre-set it to, and then afterwards if it needs to be quenched, there's also a dunk tank it at the end of it. So you can put perfectly clean bright shiny wire into this, yes anneal it to soften it and it comes out perfectly clean bright and shiny with no oxidation. Now that's a miracle but I really want to see this machine operate. Do you have any chain you could run through? We do, cool let's see it now. This chain has already been packed with solder. You basically put that chain through these rollers here which pulls it on and through to this machine. So the chain is being drawn through right now, you know I'm assuming it gets annealed and then soldered. It gets heated up similar to being annealed, goes all the way through the machine and by the time it reaches about the three quarter point is where it's finally being soldered and this is like the other machine that does the annealing. It has a perfect environment inside, it is perfect environment, no contamination, no oxygen it's all burnt out and it comes out as clean as it can be. With the burns all solder that's still some of this may still be on there so there's a minimal amount of clean up necessary. That is a motivation. Well I'm looking forward to seeing it come out the other end. Wow it's only been about a minute and it's already passing through the machine. It's pretty fast, so you can pretty much just feed the chain through and step away and it will solder it automatically. You can, but supervision is required most of the time. Well I very, whoa that's loud, can I pick it up? No, no, no, it's still, it's still hot, it's probably about 800 degrees. Okay well I’ll wait to know to handle it. Does if you liked this video there are plenty more like it on the online jewellery academy. The complete playlist is here on YouTube and you can also find the playlist group by category on the website. You can follow us on Facebook Instagram and Twitter. Don't forget to subscribe, thanks for watching
1 Comment
6/9/2018 12:03:48 pm
Excellent information on your thank you for taking the time to share with us. Amazing insight you have on this, it's nice to find a website that details so much information about different artists.
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