How hard is it to resize a ring?

[cobaltgirl]

The ring I''''m talking about.

Today, I took my new ring to get made smaller, by the jeweler my grandmother always used. I go in, hand the ring over, and they are like, this ring isn''''t pure platinum, its been resized with WHITE GOLD. They ask who would do that. I said "YOU! YOU DID THIS about ten years ago!" >:l Then the lady got embarrassed and went in back (this store is a second generation family business). Came out and admitted that they don''''t work with platinum and fill in sizes with white gold.

So I storm out.

After that I go to a well advertised jewelry store. Omg. They do platinum but inside the store (which looks like a nice fancy chain on the tv commercials) feels like those shady guys, you know in the trench coats, they open and have watches hanging from the insides of it? The whole store had that icky shady feeling. :/ Gah. :X They didn''''t even have jewelry store lights, just dim ones. Loud booming music.

So I go to another. They let me look at the ring in a loupe (sp?), now that was fun. I couldn''''t fine one single flaw. I was standing there for about 5 minutes gawking at it. I asked about color and just by looking they said no lower than H. Wooo!

In bad news, the prongs are worn to nothing. My grandmother told me now she got it in 1948, and it was worn 24/7 until 1995ish, so yeah, makes sense. The jeweler told me I have to get that built back up or i''''ll lose the stones.

When I told my grandmother about the white gold, she was spitting nails. :/ They lied to her. That is so awful. She easily had the money to use platinum and would have had it no other way, so their bull was soooooo wrong. We wont return there!

Anyways she did give me the go ahead to not just size, but have all the platinum spots that wore low, to be built back up. Very cool of her. No way could I afford this on my own right now.

Tomorrow I''''m going to yet another store and they will do it for me. They are one of the ritzy places, but they are also reputable, and work in platinum.

Anyways, besides venting, I was curious, how hard will it be to fix the prongs? Could they mess up the look of the ring? I guess I don''''t understand how that would work. I''''m so nervous to hand it off!

Thanks for listening!

 

[strmrdr]

find a jeweler with a laser welder.
For prong work on plat from what has been said here its a must have.

 

[Dis]

A good jeweler should be able to do the prong rebuild. I have an heirloom ring that had prongs like tinfoil when it was first given to me. I took it to a good jeweler and he built them up into these hefty things! 20 years and lots of miles later I had the ring repronged again because I had scrubbed the prongs down with years of constant wear. I have not seen the jeweler doing the work, but the tool was described to me as looking rather like a miniature ice cream scoop where they add more metal to the prongs.

I wish you well in finding a good jeweler who works in platinum.

 

[ssjewels]

I hope this information does not come to you too late but I am a jeweler myself and usually if you are going to get prongs fixed there are 2 ways to do it. If they were to be retipped, no one will solder them with platinum, they would use white gold solder. It takes too much heat to solder platinum and it is not the best idea to heat a diamond up that much. The other way would be to remove the stone and make new solid prongs in all platinum.
Unless a laser welder will work on platinum retipping which I have never used or seen a laser welder in action so I cannot comment on that.
Hope this helps.

 

[denverappraiser]

ssjewels,

Lasers are definitely the way to tip platinum. It''s worth checking first to see if it''s been previously tipped using white gold. If it has, this should really be removed before you put the new tips on. It adds a bit of work but the final product is much much better. The white gold insert in the shank can probably also be repaired by replacing the shank.

Neil Beaty
GG(GIA) ISA NAJA
Professional Appraisals in Denver