Honestly, I was lucky not to have gotten burned. This if what remains of a very cool ring I was making.

It was comprised of nine ellipses. They were slices of a metal cane I made, applying a glass-making technique to silver and copper wire. I wanted the final product to resemble millefiore, little copper blossoms in a sea of silver.

To make the cane, I bundled copper wire together in groups of five and six. Then I hard soldered them together. This created silver spaces in between them, but my copper-bearing start melts too low to be used at the start of a multi-stage, complex operation.

Once soldered and cleaned, I wrapped the bundles in silver wire and filled in the gaps with more silver wire too. Coated with flux, I medium soldered them together, until I had a solid cane.

Here’s what the canes look like when I’m done. I slice off little coins with my jewelers saw.

I’m not a big fan of the third hand, and this confirmed it for me. I was one join away from finishing my ring. I needed to put a little tension on the joint, since solder won’t flow across a gap. So, I decided to brace my work with the locking tweezers that are mounted on an adjustable stand, a.k.a the third hand.

I hate putting my tweezers directly in front of the torch since it wrecks their temper. I also avoid binding wire, since I have accidentally soldered the thin iron wire to my work more than once.

I didn’t stop to think about critical failure of the other joins when I was trying to reach that magical 1325°F that easy solder flows at. What I didn’t think about was that all of the other joins were also reaching that point. Two of them did and the third, the one I was trying to solder was so very, very close. I wasn’t fast enough to overcome my own stupidity and very quickly was ducking hot metal flying through the air.