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A scalpel was used to mark the silver at the ends of the guide lines, indicating the positions of the ends of the beads' graver cuts...

Next I cut the seat for the stone using a 1.5mm stone setting burr in the same drilling setup. By eye I drilled to a depth at which the table of the diamond would be just above the surface of the silver. I test fitted the diamonds a few times during this process. The 1.5mm burr was slightly too small for the diamonds, so I used a 1.6mm bearing cutter burr to enlarge the hole.

Some explanation is probably required here. The hole profile we're aiming for is shown in the diagram. The "seat" or "bearing" supports the bottom of the stone. The 1.1mm hole provides a starting point for the cutter (the fine cutting burrs are not designed to remove large amounts of material). It also allows light to reach the back of the stone, and is an aid in cutting the azures. More on that later.

I forgot to take a photo of using the bearing/stone setting burrs, but it would look pretty much identical to the drilling in the previous step. The finished holes are shown, however. If you zoom in to the full size (via the flickr All Sizes button) you'll be able to get an idea of the hole profile.

Once the emerald was set, the tricky bead setting of the diamonds was the next job. Cutting the beads involves delivering a large and very precisely controlled driving force to the gravers. This is obviously going to be a complete nightmare unless the piece is very securely held. A vice is cumbersome and care must be taken to avoid marking the silver. In the case of this pendant a vice would be catastrophic as the only available clamping sites would push right on the edges of the emerald.

I'd heard about people using shellac in these situations, so I thought I'd give it a go. Shellac is a natural resin secreted by the Lac beetle. It uses it as a kind of protective shell to protect itself from predators whilst it sits stationary on a tree branch for months, drinking the sap. It's completely insane. It's used everywhere, including French polish and sweets (heard of "confectioner's glaze"? yep - it's beetle secretions!)

I got a piece of sturdy plywood that wouldn't deform under the pressure of the graver, and drilled a hole to clear the back of the emerald (it protrudes slightly from the back of the pendant). I melted some of a shellac stick onto the wood.

Shellac is an incredible material. It's a dark orange, hard, glassy material that melts initially a bit like sugar; entering first a soft, pliable stage, then a very runny stage like molten wax. It has a nice smell, something like a cross between pine resin, toffee and musty drawers, and it is even soluble in warm alcohol!

I melted the pendant into it using my hot air soldering station, set to very low.

Stone setting time... I used the 0.4mm round graver to cut the beads. First I made three very light cuts using the scalpel marks from before as a guide. These light cuts just formed a visual guide to ascertain whether the finished beads would be equidistant from eachother, and arranged correctly relative to the outline of the pendant. They also formed guides for the next stage - a deep cut to form the bead.

This is the most crucial stage - raising the beads. It demands good control of the graver to make the three beads the same depth and size and to leave the groove with a good finish. The aim here is to make a straight, deep cut into the silver, leaving a nice uniform, tapering groove with a good finish and, crucially, a fair sized "prong" of metal raised from the surface which will later form the nice, rounded bead. Note the beads are purely decorative - it is the pushing in of the walls of the hole that grips the stone in place.

Extreme care must be taken to stop the cut before reaching the edge of the hole! If one slips and extends the groove all the way to the hole, cutting off the prong, then the piece is ruined. It is important to increase the cutting angle to almost vertical as you get near the end of the cut. This pushes the prong up, out of the surface, and will produce a nice bead later. The prong must be one solid piece of silver, so it must be raised in one large cut.

Some final light cuts can be used to neaten up the groove, but nothing should be removed from the prong - all that metal will be needed to form the bead.

The photo shows me cutting the third prong. Note how the wall of the hole curves in to grip the diamond. There I'm only about 2/3 of the way through the cut and already the wall has squished a fair way into the hole.

I should stress at this point that magnification is absolutely required for the setting process. Have another look at the photo - the diamond is 1.5mm diameter, and the cuts I'm making are only 0.75mm long and maybe 0.5mm at their widest points. I used a x20 stereo microscope.

Now it is time to convert the sharp, ugly, jagged prongs into nice smooth domes (beads). For this a beading tool is used. It's simply a steel rod with a polished, concave hemispherical dent on the end. I used a No. 4, which is 0.45mm in diameter, but it was a bit too big. Next time I'd use something around 0.3mm. It's pretty easy to do - just locate the dent on the raised silver prong, and gently push down, jiggle around, and rotate to burnish the prong into a nice polished dome. I biased my pushing towards the stone, to avoid simply pushing the prong back down into the groove it came from.

The second photo shows two finished beads (top left and right) and an unfinished prong (bottom). The lighting isn't great but you get the idea. It makes a surprisingly big difference in real world, out of the microscope.