Polishing and Burnishing

My first Tips posting will be on the importance of polishing your finished piece.

When you finish a piece of chainmaille jewelry, regardless of materials used, it probably needs a good polish to bring out the shine and beauty. For instance, when I create a piece of chainmaille, I use jump rings that I've hand-wound and hand-cut myself. Essentially, all my jewelry begins as nothing but wire. I then wind the wire into short coils which I then hand cut with a jeweler's saw one by one. It sounds time consuming and is, to a degree, unless you have a good, sharp saw blade and run the blade through a chunk of beeswax regularly. With that, you can cut through a 3" coil in a few minutes. A #2 blade seems to work best for most of my wire, no matter what it's made of.

Sawing in this way (and even with a jeweler's electric rotary saw) creates sharp edges on your rings that can catch on fabric or even skin. Throwing the jump rings into a tumbler filled with stainless steel shot for a few hours not only polishes the rings, but removes sharp burrs. When done, simply pour your tumbler contents into a wire sieve. I then pour them out onto a tea towel and spread them out into a thin layer. I pass a strong magnet over the layer to pick up the stainless steel shot. Most metals that you will be working with will not be magnetic - except for stainless steel rings. These will have to be picked out by hand. You should be okay with sterling or fine silver, gold or gold-filled, titanium, aluminum, nickel silver, copper, brass, bronze or any other non-ferrous metal that can be used to make jump rings. Take note that especially tiny rings can get caught between the shot, so look over what shot you've picked up to see if you have any jump rings in there before pulling off the shot and placing back in the container or bag you store it in.

After using the jump rings in a piece of finished jewelry, I place the finished piece back in the tumbler for another go-round. This is where some chainmaille artists opinions differ from my own.

Some say that just a few hours is all you need for a good shine. I've discovered (especially with copper) that a nice long spin does wonders. I tumble my chains overnight, as long as 12 hours. The finished chains come out gleaming and work-hardened. Contrary to the opinions of some, tumbling in stainless steel shot only burnishes - it does not remove any material from the piece. It can, however, slighty smooth-over fine details that you may want to keep, such as twisted wire. I would confine anything with twisted wire accents to only a few hours.

In summation, if you do any volume of chainmaille or jump rings, do yourself a favor and get yourself a rotary tumbler with a strong rubber barrel. They aren't very expensive and come in various sizes depending on your volume of useage. I myself use only stainless steel shot (plain steel shot rusts). What kind of shot depends on your preference. I use shot that contains elipticals, saucer shapes, round balls and pins. This seems to work best for me because it gets into every nook and cranny of the chain, even if I have to pick pins out of the chains now and then :-).