My Favorite Tool

A couple of months ago I received an invitation from my alma mater to participate in a project in which I would do a short interview talking about my career and how my education at CCAD had helped me to achieve my goals in a self produced video. Because I am a little shy and not too tech savvy I didn't  participate. There were a series of questions that they wanted me to answer, one of which was, "what is my favorite tool?"

What is my favorite tool? I really didn't have an immediate answer because there are so many tools that I work with. At 48 years old, it should probably be anything that magnifies what I am working on! Optivisors, loupe, microscope...anything that helps me focus on those pesky little details that have gotten fuzzier over the years. The truth is that my favorite tool is the torch. It is where the magic of my craft takes place. I can anneal hard metal and make it pliant, take solid metal and make it liquid, and join two unrelated objects using solder that is alloyed to melt before the objects I am joining. It is amazing and often intuitive in processes...I love it!

What makes me laugh, is how afraid I was of the torch when I was first invited to use one. I am sure the fear was initiated by my first welding demo in a sculpture class in college. My instructor was a burly, irreverent fellow who started the conversation with all the ways you could blow the sculpture lab up because the equipment there didn't have the appropriate flash back valve protection! (At the rate of the tuition they probably could've afforded to do a better job with safety...) I was so intimidated that I chose a different means of assembly for my additive project!

Fast forward to my first day as an apprentice at the jewelry manufacturer that had hired me just out of school. To myself I remember thinking....anything but the torch! At 2:00 on my first day when my supervisor announced that it was time to sit down and learn to solder posts to earrings, I almost ran out the door! As he was demonstrating the technique to light the torch ( and I was thinking "without blowing the place up"!) and solder thin tiny posts that don't take a lot of heat to heavier pieces that need more (  I was thinking, you gotta do this 'cause you can't humiliate yourself by asking your Dad for money to pay the rent!) I don't think I ever would have imagined that I would ever love what you can do with a torch so much! I tell the story about tangling with that crazy torch that day. I must have melted two dozen posts to get 6 soldered on, and almost lost it when I knocked my jar of color saver over and caught my bench on fire! The woman sitting next to me laughed, reached over to pat the flames out and made some crack about they'd be calling me "Chernobyl Chris". I still wonder how I got it together to go in the next day and start all over again!

I kept showing up, and have learned to use that magic wand better than Harry Potter and his wand! Even with the addition of the laser, which I know many of my young associates prefer, I still prefer a torch weld  for assembly of parts even with platinum (absence of gems allowing). It is like so many things in life,  if you can move past your initial fears ( which are often produced by misinformation), and be patient, you may find that thing that you feared most will become your greatest ally, or at least your favorite  tool!