Knox Jewelers Journal
Diamond Setter Needed – Minneapolis – Employment Opportunity
Knox Jewelers is currently looking for a highly skilled diamond setter to compliment our team of bench people and designers at our Minneapolis Store.
We focus primarily on custom design and our bridal production line. We take in a very limited amount of repairs and do not do any watch work.
Examples of what we do can be seen here on our website.
The right person for this position will have top level skills in all phases of diamond setting, hand-engraving and fabrication experience, as well as related bench skills.
This is a full-time in-house position only. We are not looking for outside help or contract work. No exceptions.
Highly competitive pay package. Benefits. Paid Vacation.
Inquiries can be made using our Contact Us form.
Tags: Diamond Setter, Employment, Jeweler, Jewelry, Job | Categories: Jewelry
Hand Engraved Ring Designs
Hand engraving on jewelry and other metal objects is a very specialized art form in and of itself and when skillfully placed on an already high quality ring, can make for an absolutely unique and heirloom quality piece of jewelry.
The actual engraving is done with an extremely sharp tool called a graver. The graver is used to carefully carve a pattern or design into the metal, leaving no room for error. The artisan that does the hand engraving will have various sizes, shapes, and angles of gravers that they use for different effects/designs. The cutting into the metal with the graver is often (but not always) facilitated by small hand held pneumatic devices that are essentially small pneumatic hammers.
What is Cast in Place engraving or CAD-CAM engraving?
It is important to differentiate between actual hand engraving and the much more commonly found cast in place engraving or CAD-CAM engraving in which a design or pattern is placed in the wax or prototype of the item being cast to give the look or effect of hand engraving.
Here are a few examples of cast in place engraving or CAD-CAM engraving.
Example #1 of cast in place ‘engraving’
Example #2 of cast in place ‘engraving’
Example #3 of cast in place ‘engraving’
Is it possible to tell the difference between hand engraving and cast in place engraving?
The quick answer is no, a novice may not always be able to tell the difference.
While even a novice may be able to tell the difference between extreme examples from both methods, (the example photos used here are classic examples of the representative methods) please note that there will be many examples from both methods that may be virtually indistinguishable from each other when looking at merely photos, especially to a novice.
That said, the predominant indication of cast in place/faux engraving will be a ’smoothed out’ or ‘polished down’ look to the detailing in the pattern as opposed to a much sharper or crisper pattern in hand engraved designs.
Here are a few examples of actual ‘Hand engraved’ designs. Notice the sharpness and crispness of the detailing in the patterns.
Example #1 of a hand engraved design
Example #2 of a hand engraved design
Example #3 of a hand engraved design
Example #4 of a hand engraved design
Example #5 of a hand engraved design
Please visit our web site here:
Tags: hand engraved, hand engraving, Unique | Categories: Jewelry, Unique Custom Design Engagement Rings
Unique Engagement Ring Styles – Filigree
Unique Engagement Rings
What exactly is filigree?
Filigree is fine and delicate ornamental work done in platinum or gold wire.
Filigree can be located on the shank or crown portion of the ring.? It can be used as a main, accent, or complementary design element. ? By definition, filigree is wire work done by hand.? While it’s very common to see mass produced pieces with cast in place filigree, only true hand wrought wire can be considered as such. Hand curled filigree is an extremely skilled and tedious task as the wire used is often under half of a millimeter or the thickness of 3-4 pieces of paper.? It takes a steady hand in welding wire to a ring and is often done under a 10X microscope to ensure proper contact and alignment.
The design pictured above uses filigree to hold several very light blue ceylon sapphires.
Tags: antique, Engagement, filigree, Rings, Unique | Categories: Jewelry
Can a diamond become discolored from well water?
I see and hear of this occasionally, it even happened to me once when we cleaned a 1.00 ct F color Princess cut with the last few rusty bursts of dirty steam from an aging steam cleaner.
The F color diamond suddenly looked like a J/K color with no obvious dirt or minerals showing on the diamond.
My theory is that the iron (rust) has an affinity for the diamond and sticks to the surface and/or in the hollowed out area of the prongs that are designed to protect the corner of the princess cut diamond. With even a trace of dirt or minerals contacting the princess cut diamond, the diamond will look noticeably tinted.
Here is what I do to remedy this problem, I use alternating baths in a pickle solution (heated acid bath) and heated ultrasonic along with a steam cleaner to help steam out any particles etc. This process takes patience, as it takes much more time and repeated cycles of the process than an ordinary cleaning.
As a home solution, you could maybe try some more soaking in vinegar or even a CLR (calcium,lime rust) type cleaner as long as it does not have any chlorine in it (bad for gold)
| Categories: Jewelry
Custom making a wide Eternity Band.
The following is a little look behind the scenes in how a custom ring is made.
I will start by showing just a couple pics of the finished ring and then explain how the ring is made and show some of the steps in the process.
Here are two pics of the finished ring:
Now I will show and explain in a very condensed manner the process of making a ring like this.
Here is the ’screenshot’ from our 3-D design software showing the design from several different angles. A design like this can take many hours of design and engineering time.
After using a CAM technology to make a physical prototype and mold of the two separate elements used to make this ring, the three parts of the design are cast in 18 karat white gold. Here are a few pics of the raw castings:
We casted the design in three sections, the two outside rails and the inside pattern.
The overall finished width will be 15mm. Finger size 5.25
After cleaning up the raw castings ( removing sprues, smoothing, etc) the three sections are joined.
First we tacked the three sections together in a few different spots with a laser to hold the sections together, then we hard soldered them together with a torch to assure a very durable ring.
Here are a couple pics after we finished setting the diamonds in the two outside rails.
Here are a couple quick pics with the rest of the diamonds set.
There is No Short Cut to Quality
The work necessary to obtain an immaculate look on a design with this level of detail is a very time consuming task and as we are fond of saying at Knox Jewelers, “there is no shortcut to quality”.
A master level artisan must carefully bright cut and engrave all of the beautiful detail into the areas around the diamonds and finally apply the mil grain which gives the design a beautiful and finished look.
The diamond setting, engraving and mil-graining labor (not counting design work, prototyping, casting) for a ring with this level of detail will have approx 32 man hours of labor when finished.
We think of projects like this as a little work of art with our name on it.
Click Here to See Video of Finished Ring
Please Visit our website KnoxJewelers.biz
| Categories: Jewelry, Unique Custom Design Engagement Rings
