Jewelry 102: Bringing Custom Jewelry to Life

I recently got a request to make a custom pendant for a birthday. The request came in on a Friday and the client needed delivery by the following Tuesday. Obviously I had to explain that custom jewelry takes 4-6 weeks so this was impossible, but I also realized that many people who order custom jewelry actually don’t have a very good concept of what that really means. So what is involved in making a custom piece, and why does it take so long?

Well, first thing you need to have for a custom piece is an idea: are you making a necklace, ring, pendant, earrings? Are there size requirements such as necklace length or ring size, or other things that are necessary for execution, such as whether or not you prefer leverbacks or posts for earrings?

Second, you need an inspiration design. At CRD we offer a number of different designs that already have a mold and can be sent directly to our casting house, where the piece is cast in the correct size and metal.

Inspiration can be in the form of photos that we will use to make a CAD – a computer aided design – or a drawing we need to translate. Beware of using computerized drawings made by AI because unless you put in all of the correct data, it may draw you an unexecutable picture. For example, it will draw wire measuring 1/10mm – roughly the thickness of a human hair – a size that doesn’t exist in metal wire! AI drawings are worth an entire blog so I will not expand on it more here.

CAD designs usually take much longer than 24 hours as they can involve layouts first in case there is a specific color and size scheme that you like to see. Or they require a couple of rounds of translating loose imagery into precise mathematical specs of a piece that can be 3D printed and cast in metal. Getting a CAD to be geometrically executable as well as pleasant to the eye may take a couple of weeks.

Next, the file – or the mold for the jewelry piece – goes to a service that can make a casting out of it. Casting requires a lot of equipment, as well as permits as one works with intense heat and chemicals. It’s not something anyone does at home.

Casting takes about a week, unless you have a super fast service or can get an overnight request fulfilled. Those can cost extra, however. Note also that 3D printing of a file and casting each involve separate costs.

Once the piece is cast, it is not immediately usable. One has to cut off the sprue (the canal where the metal flowed from the investment tree to replace the wax that will melt from the heat and fill with metal). The casting has to be tumbled, and it has to be pre polished or cleaned – meaning it has to be shined up, any uneven bits smoothed out, and if there are corners or areas where the metal didn’t flow properly, those need to be sanded or drilled. Imagine this to be similar to when a dentist prepares a crown (also a casting) to be put over a tooth that is filed down. Everything has to line up properly.

Polishers are usually an independent category of  jewelry manufacture. Casting houses, jewelers, setters, and polishers all work separately because the expertise that is required for each can take years of training, and all the tools needed are expensive, too.

When a piece requires soldering work, such as adding posts to an earring part, adding a jump ring, a bail, a chain or a clasp, it has to go to a jeweler to do all of the assembly work. The jeweler will need all the parts the piece requires, so those have to be purchased separately, and depending on how busy she or he is, it may involve a few days until it is your turn. Jewelers usually charge labor by the piece, i.e. a fixed fee per soldering joint, a fixed ring sizing fee plus the estimated metal.

If your jewelry piece requires gemstones, as it would if you designed with us, the setter is your next stop. An experienced setter will use a gem microscope to see where he or she is placing the pave beads, and they have the ability to cut a seat for the gem at the right depth as well as file the prongs into tiny delicate tips. They also apply millgrain, cut a channel for channel setting, or drill holes for pave setting. Some of them even engrave the pieces they set, although this is normally a separate skill and trade.

When we get complicated layouts for setting, our setters usually need 2-3 weeks to make that happen, whereas a pair of stud earrings or a simple stacking ring might get done in one week or less. It depends on whether or not the job takes half an hour or two days – a pave set piece with 40-50 gems can take that long. Again, payment is per gem set, and the cost in turn depends on the gem size, shape, possibly its complexity factor (for instance, paraiba can cost more to set), plus the setting type: pave, pre set prong, filing prongs, cutting double claws or boxes to set gems into.  You can see in the images below that the Edwardian ring has squares (called ‘boxes’) as prongs, and they are also square millgrain. The Rosette and Imogen rings also show a range of setting and millgrain styles.  

Finally, the jewelry piece will go back to the polisher for a nice shine. Toolmarks or nicks from the setting process are filed out, the piece is polished and if applicable, rhodium plated. It is industry standard to rhodium plate all white gold.

Even if all these steps are executed in one shop, it can take a week to two weeks to finish, and that is very rare. Three months is a standard lead time for a custom piece, and 4-6 weeks is considered pretty fast!

In my next “how to” blog, I will focus on how to use AI to come up with a basic jewelry design!