Getting going on our ‘Behind the Scenes’ guided tour through our jewellery workshop, it’s a challenge to pick a starting point, or tool, to begin with given that everything in goldsmithing is so very intrinsically linked. As one of the first skills to be mastered when training as a jeweller is piercing, which is carried out using a small scale handheld saw, let’s start here…..
Imagine the kind of handheld saw that you would use to chop a branch off a tree, and then reduce it to a much smaller scale. This is exactly what we use every day to cut (pierce out) and shape metal, primarily at the beginning of making a piece of jewellery. That said, the saw can be very useful for removing metal, carving out grooves or getting into small acute angles that may be too tricky for a file.
