OK, here we go with the postings, but first a bit of recent history.

The silver that was used for the first batch of castings for CN was mine, being from the melting down of some of the old castings from Ruid, back in China about 5 years ago. Because of questions raised about its purity by Stefano’s workers, I decided to get all of it (what Stefano is already holding for me, about 1.5 kg, and all the other castings and bits and pieces accumulated over the last few years) purified. Since this process costs 1,300 baht regardless of the weight (up to 10 kgs), obviously it is better to process all my scrap silver at once, so we have been trying to decide which of the old finished rings to keep, and which to recycle.

This process of deciding has not been easy. On the one hand, maybe we recycle ALL the old stuff, since we have already decided that basically everything we offer for sale on the website (once it is online, but that is another story) will be the new generation of rings (i.e. where all the masters for these rings have been done using CNC, rather than using the masters that I laboriously created over the years by hand). On the other hand, since the finished rings (all from my old hand-made masters) are already sitting there, why not keep at least some of them for selling on the sidelines?

So, a clean sweep, or try to recover some of the cost of our original investment in these ‘old’ rings, most of them done in China, and the rest done by me while we were selling at Glenelg Market?

Such decisions do not come easily to us.

Said last night that I would take the rest of the silver scrap to Stefano today, but then today realized that if the silver used for the first batch of CN castings was sus, then clearly the discarded old rings that it came from were sus also, meaning that the rings we had chosen to keep (being from the same source) were also sus.

Not that anyone would ever know, unless they took the ring they purchased from us and then had it melted down and analysed, but we choose to be completely straight in our dealings with people, so wouldn’t feel right advertising the old rings as 925 if we doubted that was the case. So instead of going to Stefano’s, I made a couple of phone calls, to Beer and to Russell, then  went into town to see if I find anyone who knew where I could get silver analysed.

As it turns out, I did find someone. The verdict was that it was 925, but I am still interested in getting a sample properly analysed down in Bkk, so need to get back to Mister Know-it-all (I mean that in a good way), a.k.a. Russell. In the meantime, proceeding with the next lot of casting has been put on hold. Received one of my small order of brass-coloured and copper-coloured solders from the States, so I can start experimenting with them. I need to be able to sharpen my gravers (I have decided to see if I can vaguely master the difficult art of hand-engraving), so have started making a guide to ensure I keep my gravers at a constant angle when sharpening.