How jewelry is made — stages of production of rings and other products at Silvers.

Jew­el­ry has always been used as a sign of pow­er, pres­tige, wealth or class. They were dif­fi­cult to acquire and expen­sive. Today they are worn by both women and men. cre­ation of jew­el­ry is car­ried out seri­al­ly using machines, not nec­es­sar­i­ly from expen­sive dec­o­ra­tive mate­ri­als. The main dif­fer­ence between arti­fi­cial and noble prod­ucts is the mate­ri­als from which they are made and the price, which is many times low­er.

What are jewelry made of?

They make jew­el­ry from such met­als as:

• gold is a soft and elas­tic met­al of a bright yel­low col­or, not prone to cor­ro­sion under the influ­ence of mois­ture. To make gold hard and strong enough, but at the same time not hav­ing the desired col­or, sil­ver, cop­per, zinc, nick­el and pal­la­di­um are added to it. The most pop­u­lar is an alloy of gold with pal­la­di­um, nick­el, sil­ver, called “white gold”;

• pure sil­ver is not suit­able for jew­el­ry. It is too soft, so prod­ucts made of it will not last long. To increase the hard­ness of sil­ver, it is alloyed with oth­er met­als such as cop­per. An inter­est­ing option is coat­ing with a thin lay­er of rhodi­um, thanks to which it does not dark­en, becomes strong and durable;

• plat­inum belongs to soft met­als, so it is easy to process, but it is not durable. A small addi­tion of oth­er met­als is enough to sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve its strength. Plat­inum alloys with gold, pal­la­di­um, irid­i­um, sil­ver and cop­per are pop­u­lar. Pal­la­di­um makes it much brighter. Adding sil­ver and cop­per improves its mechan­i­cal prop­er­ties;

• brass and bronze are typ­i­cal met­al alloys that are extreme­ly fusible. They acquire very inter­est­ing col­ors that make jew­el­ry look old­er, more expen­sive and more noble.

What precious stones are used to make jewelry?

Mak­ing jew­el­ry to order makes it unique.

Prod­ucts of this type serve for many years and can be passed down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion or remain an invest­ment for the future.

Imi­ta­tion jew­els are most often made in large quan­ti­ties from base met­als. After cov­er­ing with anoth­er mate­r­i­al, they imi­tate the appear­ance of their expen­sive coun­ter­parts.

Equiv­a­lents of pre­cious mate­ri­als from which jew­el­ry is cre­at­ed:

• gold — alloys based on base met­als, gild­ing or brass;

• sil­ver — alloys based on base met­als, sil­ver­ing or coat­ing with white bronze, steel;

• bronze — cop­per, black­en­ing of brass;

• old gold — pati­nat­ed brass or its coat­ing;

• old sil­ver — coat­ing of pati­nat­ed sil­ver, white bronze or tin;

• dia­monds — acrylic or glass rhine­stones, Swarovs­ki crys­tals;

• emer­alds, rubies, sap­phires — col­ored glass;

• pearls — acrylic or Czech glass pearls of var­i­ous shades and col­ors;

• coral, turquoise, amber — paint­ed wax, col­ored plas­tic, resins.

How is jewelry made?

Even the most mod­ern machines and com­put­er pro­grams can­not replace the tal­ent of an expe­ri­enced crafts­man. First there is a vision and an idea. The artist cre­ates a pre­lim­i­nary sketch of the dec­o­ra­tion on paper. He draws with a pen­cil the pic­ture that his imag­i­na­tion offers, reflect­ing on paper the gen­er­al appear­ance, forms and motives.

At the design stage, the artist’s vision takes con­crete forms. planned:

• dec­o­rat­ing meth­ods,

• dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments,

• the num­ber, type, size and shape of endan­gered stones,

• types of fas­ten­ers, oth­er func­tion­al­i­ty.

The mod­el­ing process takes place using the lat­est tech­nolo­gies — auto­mat­ed design, which is called CAD.

The acces­so­ry design con­cept is ready, it is scanned and trans­ferred to the com­put­er screen, and then print­ed on a 3D print­er. The result is the first mod­el — a pro­to­type, which is the basis for mak­ing a wax mod­el.

Next, the pro­to­type is placed in a spe­cial gyp­sum or sil­i­cone mass. When the form freezes, the prod­uct that per­fect­ly repro­duces the future jew­el­ry is removed from the inside by the tech­nol­o­gist.

The wax mod­el is then man­u­al­ly mount­ed on a tool that jew­el­ers call a “Christ­mas tree”. This is a plas­ter matrix that con­tains sev­er­al to sev­er­al dozen pieces of jew­el­ry. It is placed in a spe­cial met­al sleeve, into which gyp­sum mold­ing com­pound is poured.

In the fir­ing process, wax is removed and a cast­ing mold is obtained, into which gold or sil­ver is poured. After the molds have cooled, the plas­ter is bro­ken and the cast­ing is washed. It turns out a gray and mat­te Christ­mas tree. The jew­el­ry is sep­a­rat­ed from the infu­sion sys­tem and sent to a mechan­i­cal pol­ish­ing machine, and then into the hands of a jew­el­er who sets the stones.

Although the qual­i­ty of how gold jew­el­ry is made is checked at every stage of pro­duc­tion, noth­ing can replace the eyes of an expert tech­nol­o­gist. He con­firms that the jew­el­ry prod­uct meets all stan­dards so that it can go on sale and the buy­er is sat­is­fied with the pur­chase.

How are rings made using traditional and modern technologies?

The old­est method of cre­at­ing rings is rolling them off the tape using pro­filed rollers fol­lowed by sol­der­ing. The result­ing work­piece is processed and pol­ished. Then the stones are placed and a pro­tec­tive dec­o­ra­tive coat­ing is applied.

How­ev­er, the rings made in this way had a weak point in the form of sol­der­ing around the perime­ter, which reduced their dura­bil­i­ty and led to break­age dur­ing siz­ing. When using this method, it was not pos­si­ble to achieve an ide­al shape.

The opti­mal method of man­u­fac­tur­ing rings, espe­cial­ly wed­ding rings, is seam­less tech­nol­o­gy. In this method, the start­ing mate­r­i­al is a gold pipe, from which a ring is cut, which is nec­es­sary for fur­ther machin­ing on CNC machines. At the last stage, the stones are framed in a ring and pro­tec­tive and dec­o­ra­tive coat­ings are applied to them.

The main advan­tage of such rings is that they do not have a perime­ter con­nec­tion. This pro­vides greater strength and a per­fect­ly round shape. Such a prod­uct is much eas­i­er to increase or decrease in the future with­out the risk of break­ing it if it does not fit the size of the fin­ger.

Few com­pa­nies man­u­fac­ture rings using the vac­u­um cast­ing method due to high labor inten­si­ty, a large pro­por­tion of man­u­al work, and the need to make molds for any size of indi­vid­ual mod­els. This is also a tra­di­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy used in the pro­duc­tion of gold and sil­ver jew­el­ry. It allows you to use var­i­ous stone fas­ten­ers, make seals, which is impos­si­ble with oth­er meth­ods. After cast­ing, the ring is machined to obtain the final shape.

The advan­tage of this method is the absence of design restric­tions. Mod­ern foundry machines pro­vide excel­lent cast­ing qual­i­ty of fine-grained gold alloys and ther­mal strength­en­ing of cast wed­ding rings. A high pro­por­tion of man­u­al pro­cess­ing gives these rings a spe­cial char­ac­ter.

Now you know almost every­thing about jew­el­ry and you will make the right choice when buy­ing it for your­self or as a gift.