Atlas Jewelers Bench Talk

She said that she was turned away by countless of jewelry stores who didn’t want to touch her engagement ring to size it. It is made of 14k white gold, blue topaz center stone with inlayed turquoise. No goldsmith wanted to touch this ring because of the turquoise inlay. I can’t blame them, you can break turquoise by just looking at it wrong and an inlay stone ring has its own challenges. To size it up I had to add a piece of shank, reshape the ring and apply heat. I could have tried to submerge the ring in water with just the shank above water and torch it that way. That often protects heat sensitive stones. But that potentially could have still damaged the turquoise or weaken the epoxy holding them in, causing them to fall out weeks from now. Plan B would be remove the stones. That has it’s drawbacks. I would most likely have a broken stones on the removal or the gluing back in. I had a third plan and I figured the worst case scenario was that some turquoise gets damaged and I have some new pieces recut by a lapidarist we use. So, I accepted the challenge. I cut the shank, opened up the bottom to add a piece of white gold, and armed with a laser welder, our new secret weapon, I lasered the seams. With the laser welder you can hold the item being worked on with your fingers. Amazingly, the light beam is so concentrated it melts the metal together but without the collateral heat that a torch creates. Most stones can even have a prong retipped with the stone in place.

A stone did become loose from bending the ring but I glued it back in place. She was happy and could wear her ring again. And I won the challenge.>