Jewellery Making Process

In the current times, jewellery has now become the demand of everyone. Due to this increased demand, marketers feel the need to open more jewellery shops because they see a potential to penetrate in the market and thus a number of shops have now opened. It can be safely said that almost every other street has jewellery shop. Jewellery items are now extensively manufactured for different parts of the body using different metals. The manufacturing process includes advanced technology and extensive research. It is a composite process which is a set of long and slow procedures from the initial to the ending point.

First of all, the components of the jewellery pass through multiple processes. The jewelleries are formed by casting machines except for the personalized handcrafted ones. The numbers of processes that are included in jewellery making are design making, molding, casting, polishing, embellishing, finishing and polishing. Design making is the first step to produce the unique piece of jewellery. The talented designers first make the sketch of the design. The proficient craftsmen carry out the process of blueprint designing using different techniques. Each piece of jewellery has a concept of the designer behind its design and the final design is made by the cooperation of the designer and craftsmen. This designer concept is then used by the model maker to create the jewellery piece.

The master piece of jewellery is used to make a high technology mold of the design. This mold is made of wax which is exact replica of the sketch. The material is then passed through the molding process where the profession molders turn the sketch to a master mold which acts as a base for the total process. The master molds are a very complex process because the final piece depends on the master mold. Casting is again a complex process. The experienced and professional casters are required to get a final product. the wax replicas are put in steel containers in which investment powder is then filled and those containers are heated at 500 0C. The powder gets solidified and the wax is melted leaving behind a perfect effect.

The liquefied metal is poured into flasks allowed to cool and is demolished to get a jewellery piece in casting form. The next stage is polishing. Every part has to be polished while the mount is being made. The mount is carefully cleaned and polished to maximum smoothness. After stage setting all tinctures of polishing compounds and rouge must be removed either by washing by hand or by using supersonic cleaning baths. Next the embellishing process starts. When the pieces are casted and foiled an assortment of the gemstones is cut to size. In the finishing department the pieces are foiled to give a soft and smooth finish. These castings are then hand finished and the adjustments and settings are done.

Finally the plating is done by electro-deposition, rhodium, copper, chromium, or other metals by passing an electric current through a solution and then channelizing the plating material from the piece of pure metal to the object set aside in solution. After this process, each piece is checked for any defects and we get a final jewellery piece. Diamond and kundan jewellery has a different set of processes.

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Make Your Own Gold and Silver Jewellery

To begin, it is probably best to outline the traditional way of making an item of jewellery.

There are hundreds of designers around and hundreds more very skilled artisans whose workmanship is so good that it would take you and I many years to acquire their knowledge and techniques.

They use precision tools and laboriously work the metal to create their masterpieces. You can do that too, using sheet metal and wire. Many local communities run jewellery courses where you can learn all the basics.

You would learn to cut sheet, use needle files to refine the surface and edges, planish surfaces with a hammer, solder components together and a variety of other techniques. In essence, you would become a silversmith or goldsmith over a period of time.

Many of these items would be one-offs but others would become MASTER patterns from which subsequent reproductions would be cast.

In order to make replicas one first needs to make a mould of the master. This is normally a two part rubber sandwich, which is vulcanised around the master.

Wax is then injected into the rubber mould to create wax replicas of the master. The purpose, of course, is that you can make as many reproductions of your original piece as you want.

The waxes are then mounted onto a wax core using a miniature soldering iron. This forms a “tree”. The tree is then placed inside a metal flask and sealed, apart from the top. Investment slurry poured into the flask and allowed to “set”. The rubber base that sealed the bottom of the flask is removed and it is put into an oven where the wax is melted out.

Over a period of around 12 hours the flask heated to about 1400 degrees centigrade, cooled a little, and then transferred from the oven to the casting machine. The gold or silver is then melted and cast into the flask. This is often done under a vacuum to ensure complete filling of the mould cavities.

After cooling for a few minutes the flask is then “quenched” in water and most of the investment around the cast metal items falls away, leaving a tree of metal that was once the wax tree. This investment mould can only be used once, hence the derived term “lost wax process”.

The metal items on the tree are then snipped off, fettled to remove surplus metal and polished to produce a beautiful piece of jewellery.

BUT, there is another way to make one-off pieces of your own.

It still involves using the lost wax process above but, instead of making a metal master and then a mould, you would create your masterpiece in WAX.

The great thing about this is that jewellers wax is flexible, malleable, carvable and easy to work with. If you make a mistake you can fill it or you can carve away more wax. The possibilities are endless.

Having made your wax model all you now need to do is get someone to cast it for you. That is unless you want to invest many thousands of pounds or dollars in casting equipment.

There are many firms that will do casting for you in most metals. You will have to pay a casting charge and the value of the metal used. This would provide you with a “raw” casting that would still look pretty ugly in its unfinished state. So you would then decide if you wanted to fettle and polish the item or get the caster to do it for you at extra cost.

Whatever you do there is a good chance that your unique piece of jewellery will have cost you a bit less than you might have paid in the high street.

Jeremy Gilbert

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