Mechanical finishing of body jewelry and wires

A. After making and selling several hundred thousand pieces of body jewelry my advice to you is....don't bother making it, you can buy it MUCH cheaper than making it nowadays.

I'm assuming by your description you are wanting to make standard CBR style ends. If you need only a few at a time you can round them with a "cup burr" on a Dremel [on eBay or Amazon] tool (I hate this method as it wears burrs out way too fast to be worthwhile) or use metal files. If you are expecting to supply even one moderately busy shop you'll need to invest in a sander($60+)..look for one with a section of belt that has no steel backing(slack belt grinding) as this will help round the parts. Practice...lots.

Next step would be buffing (setup will be $100-ish including wheels/motor/compound). You'll need to start with a rough buff to round the ends off further, then go to a final polish (I prefer green jewelers rouge)...the downside to this method is it's a real pain trying to get inside the curves (especially 3/8" and smaller) and you MUST get the steel perfectly smooth on all areas or else you will have infection issues to deal with. How to be more productive? tumblers...vibratory tumblers...they work great and will cut production time in at least half. Cheap setups will be $300-500ish.

So for a very basic setup you're looking at $200 (add $1,000 onto that if you are expecting to try and make a profit) With $200 you could have purchased 2,000 cbr's.. Let's say average piercing you charge $20 (usually higher) so those 2,000 rings just made you $40,000 in piercings ... if you decide to make it yourself. Here's the production to expect: with files/dremel, 10 rings an hour ($1/hour); with sander/hand buffing 50 rings/hour ($5/hour); with tumbler 100 rings/hour ($10/hr). This is of course before taking out cost of supplies/electricity, etc. Profit will be half that and it's nasty, dirty work. Piercing or shop ownership is where the money is nowadays, 10 years ago you could make a fortune off of jewelry, today with mass produced jewelry made in countries with much lower minimum wage, you just can't compete.

Unless you have a custom design that nobody else will make for you, just buy the stuff. Standard 14g CBR's are going wholesale for as low as 10 cents (including bead) and barbells are down to 20 cents (external thread, internals are getting 50+cents, and these prices are for high quality, good polished/rounded 316L material.

All this being said ... if you still want to make some stuff I'm more then happy to help you in any questions you have. we make cbr's, plugs, tapers, barbells (internal and external) canes, tunnels, etc., in 316, 304, titanium, niobium, bone, horn, amber, acrylics, gold, etc., etc.

I disagree with the statement about cheaper to buy than to make when dealing with gold. Even with the price of raw materials today, I feel I can profitably produce 14K gold rings and bars for 1/4 the cost most wholesalers are charging these days.

Q. My question is what type of annealing do you recommend for seamless type 14K rings? It needs to be soft enough to be repeatedly flexible without breaking (working), but hard enough to resist easily bending out of shape. Also what do you suggest as the maximum gold gauge for bendable seamless gold rings?

A. Gold probably wouldn't be a wise metal to use for a ring like that. In order to get gold hard enough to have much spring tension at all (unless its white gold), it'll have to be at least half hard, and anything with that much tension in the metal will crack if flexed that much. Spring steel is wholly made for doing things like that, that's why it doesn't crack. Trust me on this one, I'm a professional jeweler.

A. Hello, Justin. Visit the electrical department of a 'big box' hardware store and ask to see a "conduit bender". Scale it down as appropriate.

Good luck,

A. I think that you are looking for something like the metal bender like duo-mite made by the Mark eyelet company. I think that McMaster Carr has benders of several sizes. It will handle brass to that size very well.

A. I might suggest a different solution, however it is dependent on the material you are working with.

You can get lengths of black iron water pipe from your local hardware store to use as forms.

If you are working with what is commonly passed off as "surgical steel" or any of the other common stainless variants I would suggest hot forming and re-tempering the material when you are done.
Hot forming, of course, refers to heating the material to a red heat and bending it into shape.
Two things can be done to re-temper stainless steel. Once the initial forming is done, quench in some soapy water (use lots of soap), then after it's cool, stretch it to the size you want.

If you're looking at silver anneal it and cold form it. Cold forming will re-harden it after annealing.

That's my two cents, what I've stated are general solutions to your question. If you tell me what material you are using I can be a little more specific.

A. Hi

To polish components that go under the skin , you should use an animal free compound, it will help with finishing the ends and give excellent reflectivity, as well as providing the ability to manipulate the roundness of the ends as if it contains a good CA Alumina it can act as a grinding agent.

regards,