| Hi Taylor,
A hand-operated pearl drill is going to cost you about as much as an electric one and chances are that your holes are not going to come out right using the stone age method.
Some jewelers may be willing and able to send your pearls to somebody who has a pearl drill. Although the lapidary charge (about 50 cents per hole) is low, the jeweler will add a mark up and, of course, postage and insurance. Overall it may be more economical to get your own electric drill.
If you have your own electric drill it is no problem to fully drill a formerly half-drilled pearl. If you think about using a simple bead reamer to penetrate to the other side, that's a bad idea because you will get a conical drill hole that way and if you then drill it out from the opposite side, you wind up with a huge drill hole which I will discuss in the next paragraph. Anyway, there is about a 90% chance that your bead reamer tip is going to break and get permanently stuck inside the pearl using that method.
I have some Portugese-drilled pearls, too, and they will not string on silk unless you use really, really thick thread which will make the knots look ridiculously large proportionately speaking. My solution has been to use metal spacer beads that I slipped over the knots. However, I will put them back on wire again sooner or later.
Zeide  |