platinum rant

Took in a job today that consumed basically my entire day!
Breaking out my soap box for a min...
Lady had a nice platinum ring. Fairly wide with a three stone head. Went from about 10mm at the head to about 2mm square at the bottom of the shank. Well at one time the top of the shanks was carved out at the top due to weight reduction, typical. Well it had worn thin and was dented up so she took it to some jeweler in Tenn when she lived there to have it fixed and the shank repaired and beefed up. Well they beefed it up alright! I was clueless of all the prior work until I took the ring to the laser welder and started to fill in a nasty scratch which she commissioned us to fix.. First zap exploded a hole big enough I could park my truck in! lol not really, all under magnification. Things went down hill fast after that. I thought well maybe its some low temp plat solder so I go to heat it back up to try and get it to flow again an the ring literally just stared oozing solder and wires... yes wires.. The prior guy had filled those carved out spots in the shank with gold wire then soldered them in. Layering wire on top of wire on top of wire. Had to have used ten penny weights of solder in this sucker. Gold solder at that. Called the customer and she explained the rings history to me and asked what her options was. Said I could take countless hours cleaning and cutting out all the gold solder out then building those cavities up on the laser OR I could cut that shank off right now and laser on a new solid platinum shank on it right now and be done with it in no time. She opted for that route. So in the end it went from a $55 job to $1200 job so I guess its a positive. Just really grinds my gears having to fix shoddy work done by some mickey mouse operation, and it seems like we keep seeing this sort of work at a troubling rate. I know lots of shops cannot swing the $$$$$ for a laser welder but for the love of god at least use platinum solder on platinum jewelry =(

OK.. rant over, time for a little crown and coke.

We get a hell of a lot of crappy work like that here in South Africa. It is like people don't have pride in their work anymore! Some goldsmiths here will use silver solder on gold and white gold solder on platinum! In the case you had now it may even be easier to remove the stones from the settings, re-shank with platinum solder and re-set the stones afterwards. I don't own a laser welder and neither did master goldsmiths a hundred years ago. It is no excuse to deliver poor quality work!

Beladran,

Being from MS it was considered a blasphemy to ruin good bourbon/whiskey with coke. Neat or on the rocks was a gentleman's drink. Maybe it's because Crown is a Canadian Blended Whiskey?

"Poking fun at a fellow Mississippian"

Lol everyone tells me I'm ruining good whiskey

ah, we all have those days. before i ever heard of thermoloc, a lady brought me a gold pendant to work on.i used hotmelt glue for the pendant, with no problem. i also had to work on a tiny lobsterclaw thingy, to try and fix it. the only way i could figure to hold it was with a very low temperature jiggingg alloy of some sort. it would actually melt with hot water ! well i finally got the part working,reheated the metal, almost the entire bottom half was eaten by the low temp metal. to this day, i cant figger out how this was possible !

Before I was using the shellac