Swan Ltd Jewelers

Using advanced, state of the art CAD CAM computer models we are able to create the jewelry only you dream of.

In general terms, there are two major categories of jewelry production. First is production jewelry, where many copies of an original design are made and sold using processes such as molding, casting, stamping and similar techniques. The other is original, one of a kind custom work.  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 a model,  and the worker who makes it is generally the model 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.  After the model is made, it will be molded in order to make many copies of it. Multiples waxes of the piece are cast from the mold. The Lost wax method or a vacuum system are used in the actual 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.  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 a goldsmith, 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 for polishing and stonesetting.

Special-order jewelry is the making of one of a kind items, and is not too different from model 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 in model making. Generally the special order jeweler takes a design, either their own or a customer's, and turns it into a piece of finished jewelry from start to finish. This process, can be as simple as casting a wax model or involving very complex fabrication skills building the piece out of the actual metal using a wide variety of skills and tools. Today we also use computers to design files from 3 dimentional programs that output the file to 4 axis mills that carve a wax model or build it out of wax by spraying layer after layer of wax until a perfect reproduction is made.

A bench jeweler

Although the term bench 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 of stonesetting, a bit of engraving 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 to stonesetting 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 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.