 Jeweler's studio inSão Paulo | |
| Occupation | |
|---|---|
Occupation type | Vocational |
| Description | |
Education required | Vocational school |
Abench jeweler is an artisan who uses a combination of skills to make and repairjewelry. Some of the more common skills that a bench jeweler might employ include antique restoration,silversmithing,goldsmithing,stone setting,engraving,fabrication,wax carving,lost-wax casting,electroplating,forging, &polishing.[1][2]
In general, an original design is made and sold using processes such as molding, casting, stamping and similar techniques. The other is original, one of a kind work. The bench jeweler will be a factor in many facets of the process, depending on what is needed and the skills of the worker.
When a production piece is contemplated, it may go through a design process that can range from one person with an idea to a full-scale planning stage involving teams of artists and marketing professionals. Eventually, that design will need to be made into a real piece of metal jewelry, which is generally called amodel, and the worker who makes it is generally themodel maker. This is often considered the highest form of craftsmanship, as the piece must be made true to the design and also to most exacting standards. A goodmodel maker is, along with a finewatchmaker, among the most technically skilled workers in any trade. After themodel is made and found to be what is desired, it is molded or perhaps entered into amachining process to make copies. Assuming it is molded, multiples of the piece are cast from the mold. Seelost-wax casting, which article has a sculptural inclination, though the principles are the same for jewelry casting. The cast pieces will likely need a variety of work done to them, including filing to remove the skin left from casting and prepare for polishing, straightening parts, rounding and sizing rings, and assembling many various parts together usingsolder. Although the method used is called soldering, it is actually a form ofbrazing, using "solders" of the metal being worked, i.e. gold solders for gold pieces, silver solder for silver pieces, etc. All of this is the work of bench jewelers, who at this level are sometimes known as production workers in some arenas. In this context, the bench jeweler (often known simply as agoldsmith) is responsible for all of the main work involved in turning a raw casting into a piece of jewelry - filing it, straightening it, assembling parts or adding settings for stones, repairing any problems that might have occurred, and preparing it forstone setting andpolishing.[3]
In the United States theSeybold Building is a historic jewelry building inMiami,Florida.[4] It was designed byKiehnel and Elliott. The building was erected in two stages. The first three levels of the building were completed in 1921. John Seybold had a bakery and confectionery business which he operated on the main floor. An additional seven stories were added above the annex in 1925.[5] The Seybold Building is a City of Miami historic landmark.[6] Seybold sold the complex in 1941.[7] It is aNational Register of Historic Places contributing property as part of theDowntown Miami Historic District. Seybold Building the 2nd largest diamond and jewelry center in the United States at 166,000 square feet.[8] The plan to transform the Seybold Building into a jeweler's hub had a helping hand from theCuban revolution.
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Special-order jewelry is the making of one of a kind items and is not too different frommodel making. The Main difference between the two is that the special-order piece is made in precious materials, while often a model is not, and the need for exacting precision is nowhere near as high as inmodel making. Generally, the special order jewelers take a design, either their own or a customer's, and turn it into a piece of finished jewelry from start to finish. This process, likemodel making, can be fairly simpleWax Carving to be cast into metal, or it can involve very complex fabrication skills building the piece out of the actual metal using a wide variety of skills and tools. Very often bothmodel making and special order involvegemstones, and thus the pieces must be designed and made to properly hold those.
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It will be obvious that any manufacturer of any product will design a workshop to one's own liking and it may defy convention. There are, however, some typical categories that most shops in the jewelry trade will employ. If it is a manufacturing workshop, likely it will begin with the casting room, then to the bench jewelers orgoldsmiths, perhaps to thepolishing department and maybe tostonesetting. Generally, there will be at least one model maker, who may also do special orders, or there may be a dedicated special order department and sometimes even repair, depending on the size of the shop. Usually, there is also at least one foreman and also a front office handling management. In addition, there might beengravers,enlistments, perhaps amachine shop and others, depending on the product being made. A good shop behaves as a team, each department doing its part and the work passing back and forth between them as needed. In this situation, each one is a specialist at one's job, and though they all may have a broader background that becomes useful at times, they generally will not enter into another department's expertise. Each department also recognizes the worker's abilities, so that there may be ten workers called "goldsmiths", but one will have simple skills, and another may have greatly higher ability, and so the more or less challenging jobs are assigned accordingly.
Although the termbench jeweler is a contemporary term with vague meaning, it often is used to describe a jeweler who has a larger set of skills than that of a production worker who merely files and solders rings. Thus they may have a fair knowledge ofstone setting, a bit ofengraving, and perhaps other skills that widen their abilities. For a long time throughout history the model was as described above under "Anatomy of a Jewelry Shop", with a fairly strict delineation of responsibilities. In the modern day, there are a great many jewelers who do it all, from design tostone setting to finishing with fair ability. Whether it is used in one context or another, there is no doubt that the bench jeweler is the jewelry worker who does the major metal work and thebrazing, and its meaning can also be taken more widely to mean one who is more versatile in the trade than merely an assembler of parts. The term can and has been used to describe any of the work described above - model making, special order, repair, assembly, and more, though it is probably becoming a term to describe an all-around jeweler more and more in recent years.[9][2]
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