Technique for resizing ring

[tbartman]

I am having a problem with my local jeweler, and need some advice/information.

My wedding ring has alternating sections around it - one section polished, the next florentined, all the way around, with grooves between each section.

A few years back, I had the ring resized down, and the jeweler where I lived made two cuts in one of the sections and brought the ends together to close it up. He even gave me the piece of gold he removed. This made the ring the right size, but now the appearance of that one section was different because it was much narrower.

Now I needed the ring brought back to the same size, so I asked my jeweler to resize it back up, and told him to do it by restoring the appearance of that one section (i.e., cutting it open, spreading it apart, and filling it in). I even brought him the piece of gold I had kept from when it was sized down.

A few days later the store called and said their jeweler could do the work, but couldn''t use my piece and so it was going to be $100 because "of all the gold that had to be added". I said this was fine.

When I picked up the ring, they had decided to resize it be stretching it out. The ring fit, but that one section that I expected to be "corrected" wasn''t changed at all. The pattern around the ring has not been returned to the original design.

Now the jeweler is claiming a) they never told me they could resize the ring that way and b) it is impossible to resize a ring by cutting it open, spreading apart the edges of the cut and filling it in. I am very unhappy because I wanted the ring to fit, but I also wanted a particular cosmetic appearance. I think he just decided to be lazy in resizing the ring. I am also upset because now if someone adds in that piece, the ring will be too big and I''ve been told by others that it can''t be "un-stretched".

Is he right that you can''t resize a band like this? If it matters, it is a comfort fit, 6mm wide.

Thanks,

[email protected]

 

[oldminer]

There arer so many possible scenarios.

If the ring is made of differing color golds, side by side, it is more difficult to re-size larger by adding metal of the various colors. Stretching a wedding ring is commonplace and may work, but it would not have done anything to the seam that was created when the ring was sized smaller previously. Sometimes stretching pulls apart the soldered seam of a previous re-sizing and makes a damaged or irregular area. The soldered area is probably more prone to weakness and over-stretching than the rest of the ring.

If the ring is all one color of gold, just having different surface finishes, it could readily be resized by adding metal to it and carefully reconstructing the look of the original. It might be time consuming, but not impossible for the most part. Using the old piece of gold would sometimes be okay, but one normally uses a wider piece to size a ring and then file it to match. Using an exact width piece is very difficult. It is extremely hard not to overly thin the ring right at the solder seams. I would never re-use an old piece of metal unless I could hammer it to become wider, then of course, it would not quite add as much size to the ring. Normally using fresh metal is the best thing. Gold is costly, but the amount used to size a ring is of nominal value compared to your disappoinment in getting a poorly done repair job.

Nearly any job can be right. Interference from a consumer in how it is best to do it, constraints on how much it will cost, and lazy workmanship on the part of a jeweler all contribute to a lousy finished product.

While it may be too late to really do the job right, we'd be glad to take a look and see if it can be fixed nicely. We won't be able to re-compress a fancy ring back to a smaller size although a plain wedding ban can readily be "shrunk" down by compression and the correct tooling.