Sterling silver charms ajhjewellery.com

I am developing a new website to sell my charms, it uses a more efficient set up and hopefully you will find it easier to navigate and purchase from.

ajhjewellery.com will continue as before.

http://charmmakers.co.uk.

Andy Hall

Meerkat charm New!

The Meerkat charm is only a few weeks old

and already it's a

Best Seller!!

Buy it now!

• All prices to the U.S.A. and the rest of the world and also Europe have been cut to bring them in line with U.K. prices.
• Postage charges to U.S.A and the rest of the world have also been cut!!! 

It's not all doom and gloom, whilst many people are suffering during the recession it seems almost wrong to crow about a success. ajhjewellery.com is not alone in having had a successful christmas period, (sales up 81%) and it is news of businesses, no matter how small succeeding against the odds, many taking on new staff, that will help to regenerate the worlds financial situation.

People need to feel that there is a future and that it is possible to think ahead and invest whatever funds are available back into businesses which will ultimately give them employment and prosperity.

Let's hope that if one good thing comes out of the recession that it is the end of the culture of greed and ' must have now ' that has plagued the world for the last 20 years, yes, spend but within reason and within your finances. People must show restraint in borrowing and not fall prey to the credit industry and the banks whose only interest has been to get people into debt and keep them there.

Right that's enough ranting for one day!

ajhjewellery.com  has now re-stocked all lines after a successful christmas so I hope you will carry on buying from me through 2009 and I hope we can all get back to employment and security in the near future.      Andy Hall

The retirement of the iconic English cruise ship the QEII has captured the nations imagination, so I have included a few screen grabs from the webcams of www.wirralcam.org of the ship passing the Wirral peninsula and sailing up the river Mersey to Liverpool docks.

The quality of www.wirralcam.org cameras on the approach to the docks is particularily high.

I hope you will have a look at www.ajhjewellery.com/qeiifarewellvisit.htm to catch a last glimpse of the QEII before she goes of to be a floating hotel.

Andy Hall

I've just added a couple more items to http://www.ajhjewellery.com

   a sterling silver high heel shoe charm and a polish eagle pendant,

the Polish Eagle is the polish national symbol.

There's a new page on my site keeping track of the 10 most popular, best selling, silver charms in my range. No particular reason, just for information.    http://www.ajhjewellery.com/toptencharms.htm

Nessie the Loch Ness Monster is No1 at the moment . 

I finished the Silver Thor's hammer I was making, the aim was to make it using no modern tools, the model was fashioned entirely by hand from beeswax ( which accounts for the poor quality of the finished cast item).  The thing that stood out to me was that, with practice using this technique it would be possible to produce items of high intricacy without using any machinery. Obviously if I spent all my time making things this way I would die in poverty !!  It was an interesting experiment for someone who was trained in engineering and who has spent most of his life trying to find more efficient and easily repeatable machine techniques to produce jewellery.       --------- Andy Hall

http://www.ajhjewellery.com

The last few weeks have been spent in the ordinary routine of casting but I have now started work on something more interesting, a Thor's hammer pendant . ( I have a few viking charms for sale at http://www.ajhjewellery.com/silvervikingcharms.htm)

The picture shows the beeswax model in it's early stages.Thor's Hammer was a popular pagan symbol of the Vikings who raided and settled large areas of the British Isles in the period roughly 800 - 1000AD.

On a differant tack I have decided to start a pictorial record of walks in various interesting places around the U.K. If you would like to see the first one there is a link on the home page of this site and you can also access it from here : Click on the picture or go to http://www.ajhjewellery.com/walkinguk.htm )

The cans with the wax trees inside are heated in a burnout furnace too over 700degreesC to eliminate the wax.

Silver is melted in the crucible of a centrifugel casting machine.

The centrifuge spins at high speed throwing the molten metal into the mould.

After the castings have been plunged into water to cool them and break the mould, the rough castings are revealed.

Finally after filing, cleaning and polishing we have our flugel horns, as easy as that!!!!!

Andy Hall               

See how charms are made at http://www.ajhjewellery.com/howcharmsaremade.htm

Time for the next part of making the flugel horn, this must seem a very long winded process, the reason is, I don't cast only one item at a time, I assemble as many as five hundred items for casting over a few weeks and then cast them all in about an hour of molten metal, smoke and fumes and a little bit of cursing when things go wrong. A couple of weeks work can be ruined by an incorrect burnout of the moulds, a faulty mix or poor temperature control of the molten metal.

In the picture you can see the waxes assembled onto wax trees and rubber bases, a metal can is placed over this and filled with investment, a kind of plaster that will harden in the furnace. The heat of the furnace melts the wax forming a perfect mould of the items ready to be filled with molten silver.      --   Andy Hall         

see how charms are made at http://www.ajhjewellery.com/howcharmsaremade.htm

When the rubber mould has been made, hot wax is injected into it under pressure. The wax dries and is removed from the mould giving a perfect copy of the original that can be reproduced over and over again.

The fragile waxes must then be replaced with silver, which I will cover in a later blog.

see how charms are made at http://www.ajhjewellery.com/howcharmsaremade.htm

The Model of the flugel horn now has wires(sprues) attached to it, these will form the tubes down which, first, wax will flow and then later the molten metal. The models are now embedded in un- vulcanised rubber, which is then vulcanised to produce a solid block with the models inside, in this case I have put two models in one mould to reduce costs.

see how charms are made at http://www.ajhjewellery.com/howcharmsaremade.htm

The original model for the flugel horn is now almost complete, as you can probably see from the picture on previous blog entries I have left off certain details. I could add all the parts of the horn but a line needs to be drawn, if the model is made too complex the waxes made from it will be very difficult to remove from the mould and so make the finished item too expensive. It is after all only a represention of a flugel horn.   Andy Hall

see how charms are made at http://www.ajhjewellery.com/howcharmsaremade.htm

This was the trickiest bit of making the flugel horn, cutting and filing all the pieces that go together to make the valves in miniature, 12 individual pieces measuring only 7mm x 10mm when assembled, each one individualy soldered.

Compared to the making of the original model by hand, the casting of copies is easy, that is why it is worth going to all the trouble involved. A mould made from this original should go on producing waxes for casting for years.      -- Andy Hall                                 

see how charms are made at http://www.ajhjewellery.com/howcharmsaremade.htm

One of my customers, Soozy, recently asked me for a flugel horn charm. surprisingly I didn't  have one. ( The truth is I hadn't a clue what a flugel horn looked like.)

After a bit of research I now know what a flugel horn is >>>>>

So Soozy it will take a while to produce, as, even when I have finished making the original, I still have to make a mould and prepare a cast but it is on the way! The picture below shows how much I have done so far:  Andy Hall                

see how charms are made at http://www.ajhjewellery.com/howcharmsaremade.htm

I've just added Google's site translator widget to ajhjewellery.com, you will find it listed in the page index. Give it a try, it translates from English into: French, German, Italian,Spanish and Russian. I'm not a fluent speaker of any of these languages so I can't really judge how good the translation is but as long as it's better than some of the strange translations you get in instruction booklets with foreign goods I'll be happy !!Your comments will be welcome. - --- Andy Hall                                               

http://www.ajhjewellery.com

I have started listing one or two charms as charity sales on Ebay, if you click on the link Charms 4 charity ? in the menu of this website you will find links to my listings on Ebay.

The adds are handled through a third party, Mission Fish, who ensure that the percentage of sale price stated in my adds goes straight to the chosen charity.

I have only listed a couple of items to see how it goes, if it is a success I will do more. To start off with I have chosen Christies Hospital - one of Europes biggest cancer hospitals and also a world leader in research and the R.N.L.I. - Royal National Lifeboat Institution, who are always in need of funds to finance their voluntewer workforce.

If you have any charity that you would like me to sell for let me know on this blog and I will consider it.

http://www.ajhjewellery.com