The Eid-Longhi No-Twist Anticlastic Stakes
The name may be a mouthful, but the concept is beautifully simple: a stake that won't tilt in your vise as you work. A stake that stays put, instead of forcing you to reclamp it every two minutes. In short, a stake that works.
Cynthia Eid, and Betty Helen Longhi. Two of the foremost practitioners of shellforming have teamed up to design a stake that remedies shortcomings of all the homemade stakes they'd been using for years. These stakes needed to be hard enough to form any jewelry metal, even titanium, yet yielding enough not to mark silver. They needed to sit still in a vise without the need for extra clamps or straps. Most importantly, they needed accurately machined bays of precisely the right shapes to move the metal accurately.
These are those stakes.
This stake is machined from solid 1" thick Delrin. It has 12 bays of various sizes ranging from 3/8" up to 8" diameter, with most of the bays clustered in the sweet spot between 3/8" and 2", to give a wide range of very useful sizes. This stake is scaled for bracelet sized work. It is designed with three tempered steel cross pins to support it across the jaws of your vise, preventing it from rotating while they support the stake. The steel screws are designed to draw the washers up against the underside of your vise jaws, to add another level of security, and can be flipped to either side, allowing you to use every edge of the stake.
$85
This stake is machined from 5/8" thick Delrin. It has 11 bays of various sizes ranging from 3/16" up to 6" diameter, with most of the bays clustered between 3/16" and 1.5", to give a wide range of very useful sizes. This stake is scaled for more for jewelry sized work. It is designed with two tempered steel cross pins to support it across the jaws of your vise, preventing it from rotating while they support the stake. The steel screws are designed to draw the washers up against the underside of your vise jaws, to add another level of security, and can be flipped to either side of the stake, allowing you to use every edge.
$75
These stakes are available from Allcraft Jewelry Tools in NYC. (800)645-7124.