Hang in there?

Heavens to Mergatroid!

Have you ever soldered?

"Oh, sure," you say?

Well, WHO invented this thing? HUH? This is ridiculous!

Okay, so we paid our money and we went in to the class (in 'The Big Room', as they call it over at San Gabriel Bead Company). And we said, "Okay, we've paid, and we've gone and purchased $3,000.00 worth of equipment, so now please show us how to make a glass pendant, while concurrently inhaling five hours' worth of toxic vapor."

They said, "Awesome! Let's go!"

I should have known something was up when we had to sign a waiver to continue.

We cut enough glass for four pendants. We ground the edges of the glass with a machine that makes noise and sprays out tiny glass bits that embed in your lungs and facial pores. I had my pictures all ready to go. We taped up the edges with copper tape. After blinding myself with the double-reflective copper tape on the first pendant, I taped the remaining three without looking. We heated the soldering irons.

They get really hot.

We put the pendants in a vise. You know about vises? They pinch things. Just saying.

We took the soldering iron in one hand and the solder in the other. The vise wasn't tight enough so the pendant slipped. We picked up the pendant with the third hand and started to put it back in the vise, but forgot to put the soldering iron down first. We burned one of our fingers. We put the soldering iron down on the flux that was sitting in the aluminum foil, and the smoke detector went off. The teacher placed the soldering iron on its rest, and disconnected the smoke detector. We couldn't find the solder. It had completely disappeared. We looked and looked. We picked up the aluminum foil to look underneath it and the solder flew off the foil and struck us in the mouth. We picked the solder out of our shirt. We tightened the vise with one hand. We noticed that the pendant still wasn't in the vise.

The teacher cautioned us that 'The Big Room' is not sound-proofed for obscenities.

Finally, we got our pendants done. Well, I got two done. One of them broke on one side and when I threw it against the wall it broke on the other side. The fourth pendant is still waiting to be soldered.

Would anyone like a non-soldered pendant?

The two longers ones are mine.

This is the other side:





Next up: Chris tries to get Solderer's Comp.