How do you guarantee 100% cast free?

[Abby12]

Hi
I am hoping some experts can chime in on this topic. I ask because I have been going through a bunch of old threads that question specific vendors who claim to be cast free. I believe several people have commemted on receiving a piece that they were told would be cast free, but then showed evidence of the contrary???? I do not know enough about this at all, so I am hoping you guys can help me out.
Thanks!

 

[momhappy]

I doubt there is a guarantee - few things in life are guaranteed and this is no exception. The most important thing is finding/working with a vendor you trust (and even then, there are no guarantees).

 

[Rockdiamond]

Just curious -if a ring looks the way you want why would this aspect be so important?

 

[Laila619]

Just curious -if a ring looks the way you want why would this aspect be so important?

I'm guessing because cast free is more expensive, so if you're paying for something that is supposed to be cast free, it had better be cast free. I would be mad if I spend my hard-earned money on something that was not what it was supposed to be.

 

[Acinom]

If a piece is skilfully made by a true artist, it doesn't really matter whether it is beautifully handmade or beautifully cast.
That said, if a jeweller says it's hand made and cast free... It had better be!

Top jewellers like Leon Mege and Steven Kirsch make handforged ring, but I read here on PS that for some specific designs, they use cast parts. ERD makes both beautiful cast as well as handforged jewelry. Victor Canera makes all his pieces 100% handforged. All these vendors work with 'long distance clients' if you do not live near any of them.

What are your plans?

 

[yssie]

Hi
I am hoping some experts can chime in on this topic. I ask because I have been going through a bunch of old threads that question specific vendors who claim to be cast free. I believe several people have commemted on receiving a piece that they were told would be cast free, but then showed evidence of the contrary???? I do not know enough about this at all, so I am hoping you guys can help me out.
Thanks!

You choose a vendor whose word you trust and you trust that word.

Some vendors will take progress photos for customers. I requested them because I find seeing a piece come to life piece by piece fascinating, but they aren't incontrovertible proof of anything... and honestly, I can't imagine working with a vendor I trust so little that I want photos to "check" method of manufacture :

There is no way for anyone - layman, appraiser, another jeweller - to say with 100% confidence that a nominally fully hand-forged (put together by hand from metal sheets and blanks and bits of wire) piece was in fact partly cast without dismantling it. There are signs, of course - porosity can be a sign of a poor casting, but at junctions between elements it could also be a sign of poorly used soft solder. Solder is necessary in hand-forging but could also be used to 'mask' porosity...

I most certainly do NOT advise taking the assertions of non-professional non-experts on the matter as gospel. There are a lot of posts on PS definitively stating that Vendors X, Y, and Z do this/that/the other without any definitive proof... just ask your vendor!

 

[ChristineRose]

Just curious -if a ring looks the way you want why would this aspect be so important?

Why would it be important to have a diamond when a cubic zirconia looks the same way?

To me the thought that a skilled human being who has dedicated their life to this art has worked on my piece every step of the way is way more inspiring than the whole cartel with its dodgy processes and price fixing. Anyhow, there's meaning in things, and jewelry is all meaning and no function.

 

[Abby12]

Of course it is important wether it is cast or hand forged if a) that is what you asked for
B) that is what you paid for
C) it affects the strength of rings with thin shanks especially.
D) everything should be accurately represented as a matter of principal. As pointed out above, some ppl prefer the art of it being hand constructed.

 

[SB621]

Hi
I am hoping some experts can chime in on this topic. I ask because I have been going through a bunch of old threads that question specific vendors who claim to be cast free. I believe several people have commemted on receiving a piece that they were told would be cast free, but then showed evidence of the contrary???? I do not know enough about this at all, so I am hoping you guys can help me out.
Thanks!

You choose a vendor whose word you trust and you trust that word.

Some vendors will take progress photos for customers. I requested them because I find seeing a piece come to life piece by piece fascinating, but they aren't incontrovertible proof of anything... and honestly, I can't imagine working with a vendor I trust so little that I want photos to "check" method of manufacture :

There is no way for anyone - layman, appraiser, another jeweller - to say with 100% confidence that a nominally fully hand-forged (put together by hand from metal sheets and blanks and bits of wire) piece was in fact partly cast without dismantling it. There are signs, of course - porosity can be a sign of a poor casting, but at junctions between elements it could also be a sign of poorly used soft solder. Solder is necessary in hand-forging but could also be used to 'mask' porosity...

I most certainly do NOT advise taking the assertions of non-professional non-experts on the matter as gospel. There are a lot of posts on PS definitively stating that Vendors X, Y, and Z do this/that/the other without any definitive proof... just ask your vendor!

Preach on sister!

 

[Rockdiamond]

The reasoning behind my question is that some of the finest, and costliest hand forged pieces have elements that are cast, or die struck.
For sure a tubular shank should be hand forged- you are correct that for this type of part- especially a thin shank- 2m or smaller- there's a difference in structural integrity. Hand forged is superior to cast.
But there are other types of shanks that are cast, or die struck and they can look amazing, and be just as strong as hand forged- or stronger.
Of course you want to get what you pay for...and it's also very important that a consumer is comfortable with information given by a seller.

I think Yssie raises a great point- research the seller- so you can feel comfortable that what they are telling you is true.
I know there are sellers that advertise no cast parts- but in my experience, that would limit what the most capable shop can do.

 

[pyramid]

How is the platinum metal made to begin with before the hand forging process. If it is say 95% platinum and 5% ruthenium or
90% platinum and 10% iridium, is platinum out of the ground not just platinum or platinum with some other metals that then needs to
be refined and measured and mixed with the alloy. When the metal is made up before the jeweller begins on it is it not cast by the people who make the blanks and sheets of metal?

I don't know about this and would like for interest to know if someone here does know?

 

[Karl_K]

How is the platinum metal made to begin with before the hand forging process. If it is say 95% platinum and 5% ruthenium or
90% platinum and 10% iridium, is platinum out of the ground not just platinum or platinum with some other metals that then needs to
be refined and measured and mixed with the alloy. When the metal is made up before the jeweller begins on it is it not cast by the people who make the blanks and sheets of metal?

I don't know about this and would like for interest to know if someone here does know?

yes, at some point it is all cast.
However how it is worked has a strong effect on the final product.
Once it is forged or cold rolled or die struck it does not have the same properties it did when it was first cast.
As far as that goes when it is melted and recast into a cast ring the properties change also.
Which is why it is a bad idea to reuse it without refining.

 

[WinkHPD]

How is the platinum metal made to begin with before the hand forging process. If it is say 95% platinum and 5% ruthenium or
90% platinum and 10% iridium, is platinum out of the ground not just platinum or platinum with some other metals that then needs to
be refined and measured and mixed with the alloy. When the metal is made up before the jeweler begins on it is it not cast by the people who make the blanks and sheets of metal?

I don't know about this and would like for interest to know if someone here does know?

The metals are first purified then mixed together to make the chosen alloy. To do this of course they are melted and the metal may be poured into ingots or if it is going to be used for casting it is often poured into water to make the casting shot. Caveat - this is how some of my early acquaintances did it when I first got into the business. I do not know how the large smelters make their shot, but I would not be surprised if they poured a thin stream into water too. Maybe someone who knows how this is done in large quantities can chime in.

My Vietnamese Craftsman, Bei Van Tiet did it too. When he got scrap he would melt it all down, mix in some new material and tell me what carat it was. Don't ask me how. I had a few samples assayed in the beginning as I did not want something going out the door that was not as advertised. He was always within a tenth of a karat of dead on and usually on the high side rather than the low in those assays.

Back in the days when I first hired him, the accepted tolerance was 1/2 karat. Shortly after I hired him the tolerance went to 1/10 karat. Bei was ahead of the curve on that one. I still have no idea how he knew so precisely what he had.

Oops, rambling again. Anyway, he did no casting. He would pour the molten metal into small ingots and then depending on what he wanted to do he would either take a hammer to it or start running it through his hand mill. This mill had two smooth rollers that he could run the gold through, making it thinner and thinner every time he ran it through. It was amazing how wide and big an ingot could get when he was through with it.

It also had two rollers with decreasing sized grooves running around them. He would start out running the ingot through the grooves into smaller and smaller grooves as it grew smaller and longer. A small ingot could actually make several yards of fairly thin gold wire this way.

When he got to hankering for even thinner wire he would take a piece of the thin wire that he had just created and take after one end of it with a hammer until he had a point that he could put through one of the holes in the wire plate that he had. It had many holes so he could make almost any size wire that he wanted. The holes were "V" shaped if you looked at a profile with the wider mouth of the hole where you poked the gold in and the thinner exit was the size of the wire that you wanted. He would poke it through a hole, place two chairs together, stand on the plate and pull the wire through by hand. It was something to see, this old man standing on a plate between two chairs and looking for all the world like a weight lifter getting ready to do a snatch. Only instead of a bar loaded with weight he held a pair of pliers holding onto one end of what was about to be a wire of a size smaller than it was when he started. He might pull the wire through a dozen holes until it was as fine as he wanted it to be.

So, although the metal was molten when it was mixed, it was never cast in a centrifuge. I am not sure that being molten and poured into an ingot qualifies as casting, but I will leave that to a metal smith to answer. I will only say that Bei never did any centrifuge casting at all and that some of the things he did with metal were incredible, and some of them were not so good. Those he just threw back into the melt pile and started over with. He had the patience of Job and had a hard time with modern equipment, so eventually I just left him to do the things that he did best and was never sorry for having done so.

Just my thoughts about whether or not metal melted can be considered cast. I certainly know that die struck is stronger and denser than cast and that hand drawn wire is very fun to watch being made.

Wink

 

[Karl_K]

When he got to hankering for even thinner wire he would take a piece of the thin wire that he had just created and take after one end of it with a hammer until he had a point that he could put through one of the holes in the wire plate that he had. It had many holes so he could make almost any size wire that he wanted. The holes were "V" shaped if you looked at a profile with the wider mouth of the hole where you poked the gold in and the thinner exit was the size of the wire that you wanted. He would poke it through a hole, place two chairs together, stand on the plate and pull the wire through by hand. It was something to see, this old man standing on a plate between two chairs and looking for all the world like a weight lifter getting ready to do a snatch. Only instead of a bar loaded with weight he held a pair of pliers holding onto one end of what was about to be a wire of a size smaller than it was when he started. He might pull the wire through a dozen holes until it was as fine as he wanted it to be.

I worked for a while at a wire factory.
We would get stainless wire in that was an inch diameter by 150 feet long and it would go out the door over 5 miles long using the same process he used to make small wire. Using 100hp motors to draw the wire though the die not hand power of course lol.
Then it was laid into strands then the strands were laid together to make a 1 or 2 inch diameter cable with thousands of them in it for the US Navy. Some of the cables were over 2000 feet long one piece.

 

[pyramid]

Thanks Karl and Wink. Oh very interesting about the metal and how far he could make it go. I think I remember you posting a ring he had made Wink one time and it was all leaves or berries or that type of look and it was very nice.

I once had a photo saved from the internet of a roller with all the holes in it.

I thought it was cast the metal stock/sheets but didn't know about the water method. I remember trying to find out on the internet but was not sure if it was cast as no article referred to the ingots as cast so wonder if someone who knows can say for sure what the correct name for it is.

The reason I first searched is that I got a ring from a jeweller in the UK and it was Scottish Gold panned from the rivers. They told me where the nugget was found roughly just because I was interested and said they bought if from two men who did this. When I got the ring it had marks on it - like plier marks, it was just a round band, and it had a join mark which I thought was sort of very far apart. The jeweller said it was done like this that was the style to be sort of ruggish and that. I did not like the join and they did make it look better to me but they told me it would lose metal doing so, well I can't see it but anyway it likely did.

Well when I first asked I wondered if they had resized the ring down because of this line as most bands you see have no join whether it is there or not and most in shops were probably die cast around here, thin and flat looking. Well the woman, not the jeweller, got kind of indignant with me, not nasty just her feelings I think and she said no it had not been cut down, it was the way the gold had been made, and it had to have this join, and I not knowing about it said well was it not cast in a mould, meaning a mould like a round ring and then I was left confused as she said well it was sort of cast but had other things done too.

Well I won't leave a subject ha ha, so next time I was at the jeweller I asked him about it and he told me it was drawn wire, so that
is why it was cast and then it was drawn, and ofcourse not cast in the round shape of a ring, but must have been like an oblong shape or something. I never asked him anymore just took in the part about it being hand drawn wire. It is 3mm wide, so not like the fancy work that Wink's man did.

Then went on the internet searching, this was years ago and was left wondering to myself if when the ingot bars are made for the mint are they not cast unless they are solid 24 carat, but couldn't find that on the internet, although nearly every thing is on this
world wide library.

Thanks again Wink your story was interesting to me.

 

[WinkHPD]

When he got to hankering for even thinner wire he would take a piece of the thin wire that he had just created and take after one end of it with a hammer until he had a point that he could put through one of the holes in the wire plate that he had. It had many holes so he could make almost any size wire that he wanted. The holes were "V" shaped if you looked at a profile with the wider mouth of the hole where you poked the gold in and the thinner exit was the size of the wire that you wanted. He would poke it through a hole, place two chairs together, stand on the plate and pull the wire through by hand. It was something to see, this old man standing on a plate between two chairs and looking for all the world like a weight lifter getting ready to do a snatch. Only instead of a bar loaded with weight he held a pair of pliers holding onto one end of what was about to be a wire of a size smaller than it was when he started. He might pull the wire through a dozen holes until it was as fine as he wanted it to be.

I worked for a while at a wire factory.
We would get stainless wire in that was an inch diameter by 150 feet long and it would go out the door over 5 miles long using the same process he used to make small wire. Using 100hp motors to draw the wire though the die not hand power of course lol.
Then it was laid into strands then the strands were laid together to make a 1 or 2 inch diameter cable with thousands of them in it for the US Navy. Some of the cables were over 2000 feet long one piece.

To quote a friend of mine, "Kool".



Wink

 

[WinkHPD]

Thanks Karl and Wink. Oh very interesting about the metal and how far he could make it go. I think I remember you posting a ring he had made Wink one time and it was all leaves or berries or that type of look and it was very nice.

I once had a photo saved from the internet of a roller with all the holes in it.

I thought it was cast the metal stock/sheets but didn't know about the water method. I remember trying to find out on the internet but was not sure if it was cast as no article referred to the ingots as cast so wonder if someone who knows can say for sure what the correct name for it is.

The reason I first searched is that I got a ring from a jeweller in the UK and it was Scottish Gold panned from the rivers. They told me where the nugget was found roughly just because I was interested and said they bought if from two men who did this. When I got the ring it had marks on it - like plier marks, it was just a round band, and it had a join mark which I thought was sort of very far apart. The jeweller said it was done like this that was the style to be sort of ruggish and that. I did not like the join and they did make it look better to me but they told me it would lose metal doing so, well I can't see it but anyway it likely did.

Well when I first asked I wondered if they had resized the ring down because of this line as most bands you see have no join whether it is there or not and most in shops were probably die cast around here, thin and flat looking. Well the woman, not the jeweller, got kind of indignant with me, not nasty just her feelings I think and she said no it had not been cut down, it was the way the gold had been made, and it had to have this join, and I not knowing about it said well was it not cast in a mould, meaning a mould like a round ring and then I was left confused as she said well it was sort of cast but had other things done too.

Well I won't leave a subject ha ha, so next time I was at the jeweller I asked him about it and he told me it was drawn wire, so that
is why it was cast and then it was drawn, and ofcourse not cast in the round shape of a ring, but must have been like an oblong shape or something. I never asked him anymore just took in the part about it being hand drawn wire. It is 3mm wide, so not like the fancy work that Wink's man did.

Then went on the internet searching, this was years ago and was left wondering to myself if when the ingot bars are made for the mint are they not cast unless they are solid 24 carat, but couldn't find that on the internet, although nearly every thing is on this
world wide library.

Thanks again Wink your story was interesting to me.

Thank you! I am guessing that there is a very interesting process behind that ring and you should ask him more if you get the chance.

And as I am feeling a little silly tonight with all the cough syrup and other fine things they give you for colds, I am want to say in answer to your question with my best imitation James Bond voice, "I'd like some gold ingots please, poured not cast."

Wink

 

[Karl_K]

And as I am feeling a little silly tonight with all the cough syrup and other fine things they give you for colds, I am want to say in answer to your question with my best imitation James Bond voice, "I'd like some gold ingots please, poured not cast."

Wink

Rofl
Get feeling better!!

 

[lalitv74]

Hey i did some deep research on it and although there is very less information available on the internet but still i found few things i can show you.
How to Cast Jewelry - http://www.wikihow.com/Cast-Jewelry
although this article is from Wikipedia and it is totally about how to cast your jewelry but with the help of it you would be able to understand what you need to look in a jewelry to make sure it is cast free.
another article that i found is a comparison of cast jewelry and hand made, - http://auglen.com/guide/index.php?o...wellery-vs-hand-made&catid=36:faq-and-answers
This article will also guide you to look for things in a cast free jewelry
hope i helped
**edited by moderator, no advertising please**
Lalit Verma

 

[Gypsy]

Hi
I am hoping some experts can chime in on this topic. I ask because I have been going through a bunch of old threads that question specific vendors who claim to be cast free. I believe several people have commemted on receiving a piece that they were told would be cast free, but then showed evidence of the contrary???? I do not know enough about this at all, so I am hoping you guys can help me out.
Thanks!

You choose a vendor whose word you trust and you trust that word.

Some vendors will take progress photos for customers. I requested them because I find seeing a piece come to life piece by piece fascinating, but they aren't incontrovertible proof of anything... and honestly, I can't imagine working with a vendor I trust so little that I want photos to "check" method of manufacture :

There is no way for anyone - layman, appraiser, another jeweller - to say with 100% confidence that a nominally fully hand-forged (put together by hand from metal sheets and blanks and bits of wire) piece was in fact partly cast without dismantling it. There are signs, of course - porosity can be a sign of a poor casting, but at junctions between elements it could also be a sign of poorly used soft solder. Solder is necessary in hand-forging but could also be used to 'mask' porosity...

I most certainly do NOT advise taking the assertions of non-professional non-experts on the matter as gospel. There are a lot of posts on PS definitively stating that Vendors X, Y, and Z do this/that/the other without any definitive proof... just ask your vendor!

This. Great post Yssie!