Jewelry Making

There are  many kinds of jewelers tools that have been specially designed to make your work pleasurable and your end product a masterpiece.

It can be quite bewildering as to what tools to use with what and when.  so in this post, we try to give you a list of jewellery tools and supplies, what they are and how to use them. This will give you a good overview of the most popular and versatile of the jewellers pliers available.

1.Bent Nose Pliers

Jewellers often prefer the Bent Nose Pliers to the Straight Pliers because, with the bent jaw, it allows them to keep their wrists comfortably straight while working.  The bent nose of the pliers allows them to get to more difficult small areas easily.  Normally the thinner the jaw tip, the better for very fine, detailed work.

2.Chain Nose Pliers

Chain Pliers are the most traditional & popular of pliers. The inside jaws of these could be smooth or serrated. They are used for making bends, loops, etc.

3.Crimping Pliers

These pliers are truly useful when finishing necklaces or bracelets with French crimps.

4.Cutters/Nippers Pliers

Cutter or Nippers are for cutting a variety of metal, such as for Cutting Wire, Headpins, Eye Pins, Small Chain, Tigertail, Cords and Beading.

5.Round Nose Pliers

Round Nose Pliers have smooth circular tapered jaws that are designed so as to not nick or mar the materials they are working with. Round nose pliers are ideal for making loops, circles, and coils from wire or sheet metal.

If you work with wire, you will need round-nose pliers. Get a good pair with neat, short “nose” as this will better allow you to make small, neat loops while maintaining good control of your work.

6.Splitring Pliers

These specialised pliers will truly save your fingers and hours of hard fiddly work when you use a lot of splitrings.

French wire, also know as gimp, gimp wire, or bullion wire will give your hand strung beads and precious gemstones a professional finish as well prolongs it safety by decreasing wear and tear on the stringing threads.

In this post, we are going to introduce how to use french wire with your projects.

Tools Needed

• strung beads, pearls, or gemstones
• gimp or french/bullion wire
• silk or other stringing threads
• crimp beads (french crimps)
• crimping pliers

1) After you have strung your beads, pass the one end of your thread through a crimp bead and a suitable lenght of French wire/gimp.  Then through the ring of your clasp.

2) Pass the thread back through the crimp bead and pull tightly.  The giimp should now look like a metal loop going through your clasp-ring.

3) (opt) Pass the thread through more beads for security.

4) Squeeze the crimp beads with crimpling pliers to secure and fix the threads.  Cut off excess threading.

5) Do the same with the other side of your strung beads.

Tips:

• Do a few pratices of using this technique before applying it to a real piece of jewelry creation.
• After a few tries, you will get the hang of how much French wire to use and how tightly to pull to form the ‘metal loop’ with the gimp wire.
• It might be a good idea to wax or treat your thread to make things easier.