Alan Revere--acclaimed designer, author, and educator--now shares his most valuable bench tips and tricks in 101 Bench Tips for Jewelers. Based on the monthly column in AJM, this book will help any jewelry speed production, improve quality, and raise profits at the bench. Filled with helpful, full-color illustrations, this publication offers tips for all aspects of bench work, from soldering to stone setting, piercing to final polish. Discover how you can modify common bench tools to enhance productivity; how household items such as dental floss and paper clips can become valuable bench aides; and how easy difficult repairs can be with the help of a few tricks. 101 Bench Tips for Jewelers is a resource you'll return to for many years to come.

101 Bench Tips for Jewelers

Alan Revere

MJSA Press

Based on the popular AJM column by Arthur Anton Skuratowicz and Julie Nash, Working with Gemstones: A Bench Jeweler's Guide offers illustrated insights into how to best work on gem-set jewelry. Learn about common enhancements and treatments, how various gems react to heat and pressure, how to modify mountings to accommodate a gem's characteristics, and what tools you should always have close at hand. You'll also find a handy glossary, a guide to tool-specific dangers, and easy-to-read charts on how stones react to abrasives, chemicals, and heat. An invaluable resource, Working with Gemstones will help to ensure you avoid damaging expensive--and sometimes irreplaceable--gems.

Working with Gemstones: A Bench Jeweler's Guide

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Nash, Julie

Skuratowicz, Arthur Anton

Crafts & Hobbies

The flex-shaft is an essential tool for the bench, and jewelers will often have several at hand. But too often those jewelers don't know how to take full advantage of the flex-shaft's capabilities. This book will help to change that. It offers insights and advice on how to choose the proper system and maintain it, as well as which accessories you need to accomplish specific tasks. In addition, you'll find "out of the box" ideas gleaned from the Orchid archives and the pages of AJM Magazine--all of which can help you to speed production, improve quality, and make your life a bit easier.

Making the Most of Your Flex-shaft

Karen Christians

In Adventures at the Bench, renowned platinumsmith Jurgen J. Maerz offers his best bench tricks--from innovative uses for clothespins and table salt to ingenious homemade tools--and relates lessons learned from his earliest days as an apprentice. He also provides illustrated step-by-step guides on everything from the basics of fabricating platinum sheet, alloy, and chain to using the jeweler's newest best friend, the laser. Like Maerz's previous book, The Platinum Bench, Adventures at the Bench is an essential reference for anyone working with platinum, with advice that extends to work on any metal.

Adventures at the Bench: Tricks to Overcome a Jeweler's Daily Challenges

Jurgen J. Maerz

Politics & Social Sciences

If you're a jewelry designer, running your own business can be one of the most challenging, exhilarating, nerve-wracking, and ultimately rewarding things you'll ever do. In this book, Marlene Richey offers a basic, easy-to-understand guide to becoming just such a "nano entrepreneur," covering everything from identifying a target market and setting up shop to pricing, marketing, and selling your individual designs--all while having fun along the way. She also provides real-life lessons from such esteemed jewelry designers as Barbara Heinrich, Michael Bondanza, Chris Correia, and Michael Good, among others. Profiting by Design will show you how to succeed at starting a business that you can proudly call your own.

Profiting by Design: A Jewelry Maker's Guide to Business Success

Marlene Richey

Charles Lewton-Brain is recognized throughout the jewelry industry as a stellar metalsmith, educator, and author, as well as one of the guiding spirits behind the famed Ganoksin Project and the Orchid e-mail forum. Now, in The Jeweler's Bench Book, he will show you how to best purchase and set up a bench operation, offering insights into everything from the basics of bench design to ingenious storage solutions for tools and supplies. Featuring dozens of full-color images as well as "tours" of working benches that have been arranged and modified for maximum efficiency, The Jeweler's Bench Book will inspire you to take a look at your own bench anew.

The Jeweler's Bench Book

Charles Lewton-Brain

Every jeweler has a favorite tool, a "secret shop weapon" that makes work a little smoother and life a little easier. In this book, more than 30 acclaimed designers and jewelers reveal their secret weapons, from the high-tech (lasers, CAD/CAM, laptops) to such traditional favorites as gravers, hammers, and a Rollerball pen (yes, a pen). More important, they describe why they love them--how they use them and what unique advantages the tools provide. The book also features step-by-step projects showing the tools in action, along with a password enabling readers to view exclusive online videos showing technical editors Chris Ploof and Ann Cahoon performing demonstrations. Add in the dozens of "Secret Shop Tips" peppered throughout, and this is a book that should be on every tool junkie's "must have" list.

Secret Shop Weapons

MJSA Staff

This practical guide from MJSA Press offers expert insights into all aspects of working with precious and non-precious jewelry metals. Have the characteristics of common alloys always at hand, plus advice for easier casting and bench work, tips for managing scrap metal, international marketing and stamping regulations, and illustrated step-by-step instruction on a range of metalworking techniques, including mokume gane, granulation, chasing and repoussé, and anticlastic raising. The book to help you make the most of your metals.

Jewelry Metals: A Guide to Working with Common Alloys

Manufacturing Jewelers & Suppliers of America

Arts & Photography

Suitable for shop owners, students, and instructors alike, A Jeweler's Guide to Apprenticeships provides detailed insights into all aspects of setting up a training program in the shop. It includes tests and projects through which apprentices can best learn about specific tools and skills; safety checkpoints; and interviews with professional jewelers who relate their own successful experiences with apprenticeships.

A Jeweler's Guide to Apprenticeships

Nanz Aalund

For many years, MJSA Journal--the flagship magazine of MJSA, the trade alliance for professional jewelry makers, designers, and related suppliers--has published a monthly column called At the Bench. Since it first appeared in late 1999, the column has maintained the same goals: to offer time-saving tips and techniques that simplify bench work, to showcase best practices, and to present illustrated, step-by-step projects from expert jewelers showing those practices in action. At the Bench Vol. 2 collects some of the best of these articles, offering expertise into all areas of bench work, for jewelers of all skill levels. An essential resource for professionals and students alike.

At the Bench Vol. 2

MJSA Journal Contributors

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