Jewelry Designer of fine custom
art jewelry

Making a Platinum Ring

I had to make a 4 claw platinum ring for a customer. It had to be set with a    1.50 ct diamond and made while they were on holiday in St. Maarten.. This is not as easy as it looks....

Look carefully, the ring only consists of the shank, (one piece) four wires (four pieces), and a jump-ring, (one piece).--So it consists of only six pieces. Easy, not so? Don't you believe it. The simplicity of the components belie the difficulty of the design. So we start...

A bar of  platinum, ( I use the term platinum, but it could be gold or silver, for all that platinum matters) And a  length of wire, in this case 1.20mm in diameter and straightened by clamping in a vice and pulling..

Now I  bend four wires like the two pictured. I have to bend them all the same, same length and I start with them all flat.

And I bend and solder and polish a jump ring that is about the size shown  in the picture.

I know the picture is not the best, but look carefully, and imagine that if there were four wires coming up from the bottom of the diamond , the girdle of the diamond would 'cut' into the wire about halfway through the wire.

Like the drawing

So these are the two pairs of wires that are bent with the top going into the bottom and the being soldered Actually, this being platinum, I just fused them. But solder is quite OK. Now notice the wires are bent narrow (top set)  and wider (bottom set). This is to allow the narrow set to go through the wider set.

Like this. Now here comes the fiddly bit.  The claws from the top view must be square. That is, spaced equally around the diamond. They must look equal from the side view. And straight from the end view. Whew! This is not so easy, and that is why I set it up in wax ----( sprue wax that is melted into an old shoe polish lid works well)-until I get it  friggin' PERFECT... This collet that I am showing took me 2 hours before I was happy with it.

Then I take a copper strip and make a little dam around the wires, which are set up in the wax.

 I mix some dental plaster to a creamy consistency. One can use normal plaster of Paris as well, or casting plaster, such as Satin Cast 20. It just takes longer to harden. In the old days, I used to mix my water with a bit of table salt. It speeds up the hardening quite radically. But dental plaster is still better. The angle of the photo makes the wires look skew, but after two hours, I promise you, they are not!

After the plaster has hardened, I gently pop it off the wax, remove  the copper surround and heat the whole affair with my flame. Gently, because there is still water in the just hardened plaster. After the water is driven off I start concentrating on the two solder joints that have to be soldered. And when the right temperature is achieved, they are soldered. The above picture shows the soldering finished, flux and all.

The jump ring is then soldered into the collet. For a more detailed description of how to do this go to http://www.meevis.com/jewelery-making-class-making-six-claw-collet.htm

The shank is made and bent to accept the collet  The shank is filed half round and the collet wires are filed to a smooth point so as to allow for a seamless transition from the shank. Also the collet wires are cut apart (split) so that they start at the edges of the shank. This is shown in the last picture.

 I purposely did not make every thing flush with solder, rather  made it more 3 dimensional, so as to accentuate the emergence of the wire from the shank.( I grooved it slightly with a red knife edge rubber wheel) Unfortunately I got seriously hung up working on this ring and I forgot to take a picture of  how I soldered the collet onto the shank. However, I have a picture of a pre ring test collet that I made in 18ct yellow gold and a silver shank.  This I will show as the next picture. Incidentally I made about four test collets in silver to get the feel of this ring.

Apologies for the jump. The ring is held upside down in your third arm, and each individual wire is soldered into place. Everything is pre-polished prior to soldering. The ring is then polished and set in the normal way.

I hope you enjoyed this 'How I do it'...As always, this is not the only way to make a ring like this. This is simply the way I made the ring. Any comments, questions on better ideas can be sent to hans@meevis.com