ETA: Dave was so nice, he gave me a call yesterday and walked me through a couple issues I'd been having, the most important of which was that I wasn't even following the instructions that are RIGHT on his website for how to core the beads with the Impress! I was making it way more complicated that it really is!
Here's a couple pictures of newly-cored beads that I just did, FOLLOWING the instructions! LOL
I've been struggling with the Impress Bead Liner. I haven't been able to get consistently nice bead cores. For a few beads a couple months ago, I thought I'd "gotten" it, but I was wrong. Then last night I think I finally DID "get it!" Sadly, it was the last bead in a batch of 10 I was coring, now I have to wait until I've made, annealed, and cleaned more to see if I really do GET the technique to make the core perfect or if it was just dumb luck. Blah.
The technique I used on that last bead was this (can anyone tell me if they've discovered the same thing):
(I think this will only work with silver.) Instead of turning 90 degrees, then flipping, over and over and over until it's done, I turned almost a full 270 degrees, maybe even farther, until I had a big flare, then I flipped the bead over and turned about the same amount until the first flare had pressed flat and gotten the same shape/size flare on the second side, then I flipped the bead over again and turned the crank only until the second side flare became flat. Contrary to everything we know about work hardening metals, I noticed with the silver that once I got the big flare on one side, when I turned it over the and pressed down, the flare folded over really easily, like it had almost been "work softened". Weird, huh?
I'm gonna have to make a video of this so people can see what I'm talking about. I don't think what I wrote made any sense.