ANTIQUE TIMEPIECES carries a unique selection of hand made antique style jewelry. Our rings are made by an old fashion manufacturing process called "die-struck". A negative and positive "die" is hand cut from high quality steel. The negative die is placed in a heavy duty anvil. The positive die is mounted in a 500 pound 18' high drop hammer. These are old French tools from the turn of the century. Gold or platinum sheet is placed on top of the negative die and the positve die strikes it at 60,000 pounds per square inch. The excesss is then trimmed, the sections of the ring are then soldered together, the leaves, flowers and trim are then hand-engraved.
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In the case of our ornate fillagree rings, they are made in anywhere from 4 to 15 separately struck sections initially with no holes. The sections are trimmed and soldered together. The detail is than hand engraved and the holes are individually hand sawed with very fine hacksaw blades. The die-striking proces is the way all jewelry was manufactured until around 1950. At that time gold was approaching $30 an ounce, the industry thought it was out of control and that people wouldn't pay that kind of money for jewelry so they shifted to the " lost wax" process. What's confusing to people today is that 99.9% of all jewelry today is cast. The lost wax process is 600 years old but in jewelry only since the 50"s. Casting brought down the cost of jewelry but did away with the tremendous strength and incredible detail associated with die-striking. The modern "cast" jeweler today will buy a die-struck antique ring, make a mold of it and cast it with molten gold. This only gives you an inferior, weak and relatively undetailed facsimile of the original. Our rings don't just look like the antiques, they are made just like the antiques. We make them in 14K yellow, 18K yellow, 18K white gold and platinum. Because of this extremely labor intense process our rings take approximately 4 to 5 weeks to produce. Each ring is made to order for the customer. They are not resized from samples.
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