How is jewelry made?
What steps are taken to make a ring??
Have you always wondered how.... secrets below..
The casting process is alot like baking a cake. There are alot of steps involved. I will break it down for you here as easy as I can.
Step one :
Make your "master" mold of your piece from rubber that gets vulcanized at 350 degrees.
Step two :
Take your "master" out of your mold and inject it with wax at a temp of around 160 degrees.
Step three :
Take out your wax mold of your piece and sprue it up.
Every piece is made of wax . Each color is a diffrent hardness.
Sprues are wide, to make sure plently of metal can travel to the rings.
Step four :
Mix investment , debubble investment , & pour it into your flask with your rings in it. This investment is sort of like paper mache , but way thinner. It molds around the sprue & rings to make a perfect copy . Then it hardens with your wax trapped perfectly inside.
Step five :
Once your investment has hardened for one hour , you put it in the kiln. It burns the wax out slowly through a 12 hour "burnout" process. The kiln temp reaches a max. of 1350 degrees. Depending on your piece of jewelry ,it's thickness , & amount of detail you judge what temp it needs to be cast at. i.e. : filigree gets taken out & cast at 1350.
Step six :
At this point all wax is gone. The investment is a perfectly molded empty crevis of your ring.Take your flask out of kiln, & off to the vacuum caster . The vaccum casting machine sucks the metal down & in an outward motion while you pour your molten metal into it.
Step seven :
Once the metal has been poured into the flask , you wait for the cherry red metal to cool. When it turns back to a normal color , you quench the whole flask in water. When you quench the investment at this hot temp it erupts in the water. It breaks up into dust again & your sprue is free in the water .
Step eight :
Cut your pieces off, file them and do finishing work. This includes quenching it in acid water to get the oxidization off ,Called pickle.
And then polishing steps are taken to make it shiney.
shown without final polish.
Which makes it even more shiney & brings out detail.