When three different clients approach you within a one month span, all asking if you can melt their old family jewelry down to make something new, you know it’s something you need to look into. While melting scrap gold might sound simple enough, in actuality it’s a little more complicated, and not all jewelers will do it. Most gold refiners won’t return you with the exact same gold you gave them - they’re far too busy for such “small” requests. And simply melting down aunt Judy’s ring in the crucible and throwing it into the new casting is both risky and very costly: not only can that metal become brittle and a little unpredictable, but when done this way, the jeweler needs to come up with enough gold to fill the entire “tree” and “sprue” in the casting (the lines through which the molten gold travels to get to your new ring)… aka that requires thousands of dollars more gold than is needed for the individual piece itself. Hence my earlier statement that many jewelers simply won’t do it.
By happenstance, though, I discovered that I actually have a special connection to a gold refiner who WILL return your own precious family gold to you, in a chunk of solid, pure 24k. Luck? Coincidence? Maybe a bit of both. But all of this is to say, that after some time and research, I finally got the process down, and have been able to make these customers new gold jewelry that they’ll love and wear everyday, out of their old gold jewelry that, while heirloom, was wasting away in a box. So why not transform your old 10k, 14k and 18k gold pieces that you don’t love, into something that you do? Nothing more alchemical than that, I’d say. To inquire, just shoot me an email at vanessa@talismanfinejewelry.co.