Today was my first day in the workshop and it definitely wasn't a simple task. My Uncle Fareed had my start the same way as all the past people he has trained, by soldering. He gave me a sheet of metal and sterling silver wire and had me cut the wire into pieces about five millimeters long. He showed me how to solder and it seemed fairly simple, you take the metal sheet and poor some acid on it, cut sterling silver solder off of a very thin sheet of silver, brush alcohol on the five millimeter pieces of silver, heat the silver and touch it to the thin sheet of solder, and top it off by melting the solder and the silver onto the metal sheet.
As I was watching him I thought it would be a fairly simple task but I was quickly proven wrong. He started out by soldering two pieces before he let me try and it didn't take me too long to mess the entire thing up. I managed to put the first one on my first try, but when I went to put the next one on I accidentally completely melted the one I had previously put on and knocked over the two pieces my uncle soldered. I quickly learned that this would be no simple task as I continued to mess up several times before finally making the pegs stay up. I had finished one row and as I went to solder another peg in the second row, all of the ones in the first row either fell over because I accidentally heated them or completely melted.
By the time I had knocked all of the pegs over, it was closing time. I proceeded to turn off my blow torch and pack away the stuff I worked with. I plan to return Thursday and continue soldering the pegs and hopefully have a little bit more success than today.
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