Jewelcadmasters.com

Designing

Hello again and thank you for vis­it­ing my design­ing page.  In this sec­tion I am going to give you my per­sonal views and dif­fer­ent aspects on design­ing jew­elry but before we get there I am going to gather all the years of per­sonal expe­ri­ence in cre­at­ing jew­elry to sup­port my def­i­n­i­tions. Note that these def­i­n­i­tions are going to be con­cise.  If you need more infor­ma­tion go into my con­tact page and send me a mes­sage with your questions.

I will explain the com­plete jew­elry mak­ing process begin­ning with:

Wax Model Mak­ing: There are two types of wax mod­el­ing.  The first one is by work­ing directly on a wax block using dif­fer­ent types of tools; the most essen­tials are files, saw blades and carv­ing tools.  A good jew­eler will always cus­tomized and build his or her own tools.

The sec­ond one will be through cad­cam which means cre­at­ing a model first through a 3-D soft­ware and run­ning the file on a pro­to­type machine to obtain the resin.  Once the wax is made we go to the next step which is casting.

Cast­ing Sil­ver:  In jew­elry terms cast­ing is noth­ing less than con­vert­ing wax into metal.  This sounds a lit­tle odd, right?  Well is more com­pli­cated than odd.  First you take the waxes and attach them to big­ger piece of wax that looks like a small pipe; this is call mak­ing the tree.  After the tree is made it gets placed inside a metal con­tainer called flask.  This flask gets filled with cast­ing com­pound a.k.a. Invest­ment then the flask goes into an oven overnight and the result is that the resin gets burned out leav­ing the shape of the waxes inside the flask, this process is called de-waxing the flask.  The next step is called the flask  burn out, after that the sil­ver grain get melted at a very high tem­per­a­ture into a liq­uid form, this liq­uid sil­ver gets poured into the flask through a cast­ing machine tak­ing the shape of the waxes, after it cools off you will obtain the sil­ver.  Now is time to clean it.

Sil­ver Jew­elry Clean­ing:  Let’s assume that the sil­ver that just came out from cast­ing is a pen­dant. This pen­dant is usu­ally given to the jew­eler to be cleaned, this means to take all the rough­ness from the metal, to fix any poros­ity that it may have and to attach a spreu which is basi­cally a piece of cop­per wire welded onto one of the ends of the pen­dant, usu­ally the end that has less details.  Now the pen­dant is ready for rub­ber molding.

Rub­ber Mold­ing: Also two types.  First we have the con­ven­tional type, rub­ber slices that get placed on top of each other then you put your pen­dant in the mid­dle and some more slices on top.  This rub­ber gets placed inside a mold­ing pan that goes into a a heat­ing presser for about an hour (depend­ing on the presser) where the rub­ber gets solid­i­fied into one piece.  After it cools off the rub­ber mold gets cut through the mid­dle in order to get the sil­ver out, now the rub­ber mold has the shape of the pendant.

The other type of mold­ing is called “cold mold­ing”.  This mold­ing process is used to make molds out of resins from the pro­to­typ­ing machines or from fin­ished jew­elry.  This is made with a sil­i­con com­pound, the resin or metal model gets placed inside a mold and the sil­i­con com­pound gets poured in until it dries up.    It takes sev­eral hours to get dry, hard and ready to be cut to get the metal or resin model out; once the sil­i­con mold  is cut every­thing is set to start production.

Mak­ing The Waxes:  This process is made through a wax inject­ing machine.  Remem­ber the spreu on the sil­ver?  Well the pur­pose of the spreu is to cre­ate an open­ing on the rub­ber mold where the wax get injected, the wax is hot and also in a liq­uid form, once inside the rub­ber mold the cool­ing time is a few min­utes.  You can repeat this process and make as many waxes you want for production.

Mak­ing The Tree:  Same process like cast­ing the sil­ver, the only dif­fer­ence is that now you have the option of cast­ing in dif­fer­ent met­als and quantities.

Lost Wax Cast­ing:  There are dif­fer­ent pro­ce­dures for cast­ing dif­fer­ent met­als. The tem­per­a­ture varies from metal to metal, also for cast­ing plat­inum you need a dif­fer­ent cast­ing machine.  Plat­inum get melted at a higher temperature

After Cast­ing:  Now that the casted tree with all the pen­dants is out the pen­dants need to be sep­a­rated from the tree by cut­ting the spreus.  Now the pieces are ready to go into jew­elry cleaning

Jew­elry Work:  The next step is to ground off the metal where the spreu was cut and to clean the pen­dants.  A good jew­eler will always check the metal for flaws (dents and poros­ity).  The next step will be to put the pen­dants into the tum­bler and this depends on the jew­eler, some jew­el­ers like to tum­bler the pieces before clean­ing and some after clean­ing to get them ready for pre-polish.

Pre-Polish: A good pol­isher will always start by check­ing the pieces for any flaws before start­ing to work on the piece.  Basi­cally pre-polish means lap­ping the piece if it needs to, shin­ing the neg­a­tive side or win­dows and pol­ish­ing the set­tings surroundings

Stone Set­ting:  Only if there are gems that need to be set.  Also a good dia­mond set­ter will check the piece before work­ing on it to acknowl­edge any issues.

Qual­ity Con­trol:  This is the final step on this jew­elry mak­ing process, the per­son per­form­ing this duty always look for poros­ity on the metal, stain on the metal (usu­ally due to rhodium plat­ing), even shape, loose stones, crooked stones, same dia­mond color and clar­ity, over pol­ish­ing and over­all simmetricity.

Before I get into the def­i­n­i­tion of design­ing I must men­tion some­thing very impor­tant to any­body in the jew­elry indus­try and  that it never gets old to me:  It takes a lot of effort and time to cre­ate fine jew­elry but it only takes a minute in the hands of a care­less or inex­pe­ri­ence per­son to ruin it.

DESIGNING JEWELRY

When it comes to jew­elry design­ing I must men­tion the two most com­mon types of design­ers: The artis­tic designer and the tech­ni­cal designer.

Artis­tic Designer: As the name states it, is a tal­ented indi­vid­ual with a very cre­ative mind and draw­ing abil­i­ties capa­ble of turn­ing the bizarre into beauty and vice versa.  This cre­ativ­ity has two dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories that I must men­tion; the first one is when the designer is a nat­ural which means that he was born with the gift of design­ing. For exam­ple, the designer is in a park look­ing at a tree, look­ing at the branches and how they inter­lace with each other and all of a sud­den this vision becomes an idea that devel­ops into a pat­tern, very soon the designer is going to visu­al­ize this pat­tern into a hand draw­ing to become a piece of jew­elry, a bracelet, a pen­dant, the shank of a ring, etc.

The sec­ond one is when the artis­tic designer has the nat­ural abil­i­ties but doesn’t know exactly how to bring them out and seeks the help of a tech­ni­cal school to get help on how to express and develop ideas that become a design.  There the future designer learns about draw­ing tech­niques, tex­tures, trends, col­ors, mate­ri­als, how to be cre­ative, how to visu­al­ize, how to think jew­elry, per­haps how to use a soft­ware to cre­ate jew­elry.  It will also learn about met­als, gems and the process of how a jew­elry piece is made.

Tech­ni­cal Designer:  It’s very hard to describe in a few para­graphs what a tech­ni­cal designer is but I will do my best to sim­plify it for you.  Let’s begin by say­ing an arti­san and an engi­neer that usu­ally has a Bachelor’s degree.

An arti­san, also called a crafts­man, is a skilled hands on worker who crafts items in metal that may be func­tional or strictly dec­o­ra­tive, here is where the gold­smith and sil­ver­smith cat­e­gories fall in.  In this case we are going to apply this def­i­n­i­tion to our field which is jew­elry so let’s talk goldsmith.

Gold­smith is the process of mak­ing jew­elry directly onto the metal; a per­son that can shape the metal, clean it, weld it, pol­ish it, and set pre­cious stones.

An engi­neer, some­one that may not nec­es­sar­ily have the tal­ent like the crafts­man but has the pas­sion for design­ing jew­elry, this indi­vid­ual will attend school and will learn design­ing, and in a four year pro­gram it will spend half the time in a jew­elry shop try­ing to learn what the arti­san has been doing in most cases most of their life.  One of the advan­tages of an engi­neer is the dif­fer­ent types of soft­ware that is being used to cre­ate jew­elry that helps with accu­racy and tim­ing.  They both have their advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages but will is another chap­ter that I will write about in the future.