Stage 2 Riveting Projects: When the Practice Matters More Than the Piece
This post is part of my ongoing apprenticeship in traditional goldsmithing through Jewellery Training Solutions, under master goldsmith Peter Keep. You can read the full bench journal and follow the project sequence on the Apprenticeship Journey page.
This week I finished the articulated animal for Stage 2 Riveting Projects of the apprenticeship. The assignment was to design an animal and join its moving parts with rivets. I chose a dog, with articulated legs, tail, head, and ears. By the end of the week, it was finished and working the way I had hoped. The joints moved cleanly. The project met the brief. Technically, it did what it was supposed to do. That said, I’m not especially happy with the piece.
This week turned into a reminder that technical success and creative satisfaction are not the same thing. The dog works, but it feels more like an exercise than a piece of jewelry. It is larger and clunkier than I would like, and although the brief gave plenty of freedom, I did not push the design far enough. I could have put more thought into making it feel more resolved—something with a stronger sense of intention, maybe even something that could have functioned as a pendant or another wearable object. Instead, it reads more as a completed training piece. There is nothing wrong with that, but I can’t pretend it fully satisfies me. What made the week worthwhile was not so much the final object as the process of getting there.
Riveting is one of those techniques that looks almost insultingly simple until you actually try to do it well. Compared with soldering, it seems stripped down to the bare essentials. No flame. No flux. No worrying about melting metal or the heat running where it should not. Just a short length of wire, a hammer, and controlled force. But the simplicity is deceptive. The real difficulty is not making a rivet hold. The real difficulty is making several rivets look consistent, move properly, and leave the surrounding metal untouched.
Before I assembled the final dog, I spent a great deal of time practising on scrap brass and copper. In fact, I spent more time doing that than I spent on the final assembly itself. I worked through flush and domed solid-wire rivets, trying to make the heads more even, keep the surrounding surface clean, and learn how much force was enough and how much was too much. For the domed rivets, I used a standard cheap nail set from Home Depot, and it worked like a charm. That repetition mattered. It built confidence, yes, but more importantly, it gave me a method.
Bench notes from the week: setting rivets by hand on the articulated dog using a nail set, the Whaley sliding hammer doing its part, the feeler gauge that kept the rivet lengths consistent, and Chico reclining on the couch with enough drama to suggest he may have been taking his role as model a little too seriously (reminiscent of when Rose asked Jack to "Draw me like one of your French girls").
One of the most useful things I did was standardize the rivet length with feeler gauges rather than relying on guesswork (yes, the sort of feeler gauges one uses with automotive applications). That immediately improved consistency. I also leaned heavily on the Whaley sliding hammer, which proved to be an excellent tool for this kind of work. Between that, the nail set for forming the domed heads, and the hours of practice on scrap, by the time I moved to the actual dog the riveting itself was relatively straightforward—not because the process had become easy, but because I had already worked through the uncertainty beforehand.
That is probably the biggest lesson I’m taking from this week. When I am dealing with a new technique or a tool I have not really internalized yet, practice is not wasted time. It is not a detour from the real work. It is the reason the real work has a chance of succeeding in the first place. Better to spend that time up front than to rush into the final piece, mess it up, and have to start over.
So I’m moving on. The dog is done. It fulfilled the criteria. It taught me what it needed to teach me. But I’m already into the next project, the riveted ring, and that is where I want to carry this week’s lesson forward. The goal now is not only to execute the technique more confidently, but to bring more intention to the design from the start. The bench skills matter. So does making something that actually feels like jewelry. Next week, that is the standard I want to chase.