How Solid Brass and Brass with Silver Finish Beads are Made
Brass is a metal alloy that’s mostly made from zinc and copper. The quantity of zinc and copper will depend on the brass makers. The common metal alloy is used as a base component in furniture, musical instruments, door knobs, and many more. Brass is also used as a raw material in jewelry. In this article, we will give you an exclusive look on how our metal brass and silver beads are made.
Step 1. Cutting the Raw Brass
The first step is cutting the brass metal into tiny pieces. Take note; the brass metal used in the process are recycled brass scraps or purchased from metal manufacturers. The brass is usually shaped like a long rod which is fit into the cutting machine. The tiny pieces of brass metal you see on the image above are the by-product of the cutting process.
The cutting machine looks like this:
Step 2. Flattening and Shaping the Brass
The next step is to flatten the brass according to the desired shape. This part of the process is more of a straight-forward and old school approach—smashing the metal with a hammer.
Crimping tools are used to help shape the metal.
Step 3. Drilling Holes
A centralized drilling machine is used to drill holes into the metal brass. As you can see, it’s more of a manual process in which the every single piece is drilled.
Here is the centralized drilling machine which has 4 drilling stations.
Step 4 Stringing and Finish
Every tiny metal brass is meticulously inserted onto the string. Yes, every one of those little pieces is manually embed (which kind of takes forever).
Step 5 The Finish
After all the metal pieces are stringed up, it is then drenched into a solution (brass coating or silver coating) that will give the metal a brass or silver finish. It will be then left to dry for a few hours. Voila! The brass metal beads are now finished!
