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Design jewelry with a beautiful matte finishDesign jewelry and make the bright polish your trademark. It gives your design that final touch that surprises your clients. You can make lots of different textures and finishes using your flex shaft, an indispensable tool for every jeweler. Foredom carries many accessories including lots of options for polishing metal. You can find abrasives, brushes, polishers, sanding bands and burs. Each of them has specific characteristics and uses depending on the result you want. Let’s look at some of the accessories widely used by jewelry makers. Warning: always wear eye protection! Grinding stones - abrasivesHere you can see a pink grinding stone being used in a strip of sheet metal. It achieves a slightly textured finish and you can vary the pattern by drawing circles or making straight lines.These pink points are also used to smooth away imperfections and to refine details.
Textured surfaces don´t have to be even, they can also have some kind of “design” to it. You can play around with larger pieces of sheet metal (could be copper) to experiment by moving the grinding stone in straight lines, circles or any other pattern you wish. Matte and satin finishes wheels
This synthetic fiber disc is less hard than the pink grinding stone. The texture is finer and smoother, but I kind of like the sheen that brings to the metallic surface, although it heats up the strip of metal in no time.
Home-made matte finish wheelThis is a great polishing method I use allot. It’s really easy to make, just buy a green kitchen fiber (Scotch-Brite) in the supermarket and cut out a circle of about 1” in diameter with scissors and pass a metallic wire through the middle to open-up the fibers.Adjust this home-made disk to a flex shaft mandrel and use.
Please wear eye protection with this one because as soon as the motor starts running lots of bits of fiber start to fly off the disc. But it makes a beautiful matte, “brushed” finish on your jewelry. Sanding bands
These bands make a gentle texture on the metal. It is very similar to the effect achieved with the synthetic fiber disc but a bit finer. It heats the metal quite allot too.
Silicon polishers
To give a shiny surface, sort of mirror-like finish, use this blue silicon polish applying light pressure on your work. The wheel is particularly designed to polish in hard to reach areas because if you want a glossy finish, its best obtained in a proper polishing machine, but if you don’t have one, this is an alternative. They come in lots of shapes and sizes to fit everywhere. Slotted mandrelsSanding is extremely easy using the slotted mandrel for your flex shaft. Cut a rectangular piece of sanding paper, about 1” wide and 3” long. Fold twice the width and insert it into the slot of the mandrel.Run the machine to check that the sanding side rotates outwards.
The first time you use this accessory don’t worry about the noisy “flapping”, just smoothly run the machine and the sanding paper will coil within itself making a cylindrical device for you to sand any metal extremely well.
Learn how to make silver flower earrings and practice all these basic techniques
here.
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