Welcome to the GuiltTrips podcast. I'm your host, Kendra Lockhart. As a goldsmith and
gemologist, I'll be speaking 24 carat on all things jewelry, metals, and gems. Join
me plus a few friends to demystify both materials and designs as your private jeweler. Let's
tune in on these topics and get golden. As a goldsmith, there's a part of me that is
up for the challenge of finding a solution in real time in an unfamiliar situation. And
that's the beauty of being somebody who's proficient at repairing people's treasures.
The part of repair that we don't love is when we have gotten a little too much hubris, curiosity,
confidence, or simply found out the not so easy way that our big idea did not solve the
problem. Today I'm going to discuss all the different ways that I was led into the world
of repair work and all the times it's best to lead yourself out of that conversation.
So let's begin. Throughout my career as a salesperson, especially in the beginning,
it wasn't my job to architect how we were going to fix things. Either it was straightforward
enough that you could tell the client, this is doable, here's how much it's going to
cost, and then take it to the goldsmith or the jeweler and simply leave it for them
to complete. In other situations, it's not as straightforward. If the repair artist
is there at the time, you may step away from the conversation with the owner of the item
and ask a few questions. Sometimes you'll have to be told what you're seeing or not
seeing because you're not going to be the one working on it. Other times you'll think
you have an idea on how this could be executed, promise the customer, leave it for the goldsmith,
and get the bad news that it's not going to work and have to make that phone call. Now
these are all possibilities when you are not at the jewelry bench. What happens when you
are and find yourself in the role of not only being the person who has to complete the task,
but partner with the sales associate who has set the expectations or is passing the communication
along to you from its original wearer. I'm going to cover 10 different types of repair
work that were best being turned away, ones that definitely burned me, and a few that
my colleagues were kind enough to say, hey kid, don't ever try this, learn from my mistakes.
How did I get started in the work of repairing? It certainly didn't happen when I was a designer
and there's no business on the jewelry bench for somebody who's on the showroom floor.
It started as an assessment test for my goldsmithing apprenticeship. One of the first auditions
quote unquote was a silver band and I was told, create sizings on this until you can't
use any more. Now I had already known from school that you want to keep sizings as far
apart from each other as possible. So if my first sizing was at the 12 o'clock mark on
the ring, the next one was at the 6 o'clock. And then I stepped down as far as solder temperature
and trying a 3 o'clock and then 9 o'clock and so on and so on. I think I got to 7 sizings
before the ring fell apart because every time you have to size a ring, you have to heat
it up. Every time you're adding heat, you're putting high temperature back through all
of your previous work. I wasn't aware that this was a test and I got to the point where
the ring fell apart. Owner who was in charge of my apprenticeship said, why didn't you
stop sooner? And I said because you said size this until you can't. And he said it was more
about you figuring out your can't than pushing it until the ring experienced metal fatigue
or all of the work just fell apart. It seems like a dick move and it can fall in the category
of hazing the new kid, but it was a valuable lesson to awaken my intuition and ask myself
when do I wear out before the item I'm working on wears out. Another challenge as far as
repair work that I was given was here's a bunch of castings and I want you to size them
to the appropriate ring size for each of the orders and here's 30 minutes but I'm taking
the clock away. You need to finish all seven of them in 30 minutes. I'm coming back. Insert
diabolical laughter. This is when you have to get creative not just with your time management
but with your own cadence and finding a rhythm. Fortunately, he had left the radio on and
back then songs were about three and a half minutes long. For the most part, I had another
form of clock. Was I able to finish the task in the 30 minutes? Yes, much to his amazement.
Did I ever tell him what my trick was? Absolutely not. The last test as far as the repair hazing
practice was I was given a white gold ring and asked to size it. He had said it was already
annealed and when I began working on it, it wouldn't budge. It was impossible to hammer
it up on the mandrel to its finished ring size before we were going to sand prep and
polish. At some point, I gave it to one of the other goldsmiths and said, I can't get
this to move. It's stuck at size seven. It's got to go to a seven and three quarters. And
that goldsmith put it on a ring stretcher and cranked it. I passed along that it had
been annealed because that's what I was told. And when he put it on the ring stretcher,
it created cracks. So we took it to the owner and the owner in another gotcha move said,
just because I said I annealed it, you should have checked to see if it truly was. You should
have re annealed it if it wasn't behaving properly. Don't just go off of what I said,
go off of what the metal is telling you. So those were my three less than glamorous introductions
into the world of repair. And thankfully, I've covered a lot of ground since then.
The first ring that shouldn't have been repaired was gold that was overworked. Now that can
mean a couple different things. That it's got metal fatigue, that the shank is worn
too thin, that it's been bent too many times, is out of round, or that you can tell it's
been through a lot of hands of a lot of jewelers. If you lightly flame a ring, sometimes former
sizing marks in areas where work was done will show up. There was a ring from a client
named Tracy, and it had already been sized three times, and now was severely bent because
the gold was so thin, one from where, and two from sanding and polishing each time the
ring had been fixed as far as the cracks in the band. This was definitely an opportunity
not to try again, and unfortunately, I was young, I decided to hero it, and it was that
last sizing that pulled all the other ones apart and cost me having to get fresh metal
and create a new half shank for her. I had quoted $40 for the repair. I ended up spending
$100 in materials plus my time plus my labor. The second item that I got to witness a colleague
turn down was a Frankenstein ring. This was something that hadn't been casted up with
any sort of integrity, rather it was more like leftovers. A bunch of strange parts were
being assembled. For example, it was a band that had a hole drilled through the center
so that a head with a peg could be inserted, but the side stones were old necklace brackets
that were soldered on top of a ring that was rounded so they didn't even fit right. They
were just flat bottoms sitting on top of a curve like a speed bump. Definitely an exercise
in creativity, but certainly not in any sort of structural soundness. So when a client approached
my colleague and said, I'm really hoping that this ring can go up three sizes, not only
was the ring done incorrectly the first time when it was originally created, there was
absolutely no way that alone that I could support any more work, much less the sizing
of three sizes up as a three stone ring. So that's when he decided to make the call and
say this is 100% going to go badly and I can't do it. What I can do is take your gold in
on trade and we can remake the ring the proper way so that you can have multiple sizing opportunities
for the life of the piece, including if you decide to heirloom this and hand this down
to other family members. It was an excellent conversation and pivot where not only did
the client still get the solution of this is not my size, but I love my ring. You probably
love the gemstones even more than you love the metal mounting, but also to foster that
trust and that ability to be advised as a client because he's telling you you're going
to have this for years, not months if we do it this way and work on it. The third repair
that you really want to stay away from and I've seen this as far as witnessing because
the only watches I polish are my own is an overpolished watch. Oftentimes, if you don't
send it back to the factory or the original maker, you're taking a risk as far as the
quality of the refurbishing. Steel is soft and it scratches up pretty easily. Even if
it's a gold watch, you're really going to want to send it back to the original maker
or the primary creator simply because they have experience. Let's take Rolex for example.
If they produce a million watches a year, they know exactly how they're polishing that
same component a million times to their own factory specs and quality assurances. Now if
you give it to me, I've polished two Rolexes in my life and I might not get the edging
and squaring up the sidewalls just so. What if Rolex has different equipment and better
polishing machines such as a flat lap and here I am playing around with what I've got. Suppose
I'm trying to bring a knife to the gunfight of how Rolex would do it. It's important
to not work on an overpolished watch especially if the client is hoping for resale value because
if you break the wrong edges, it takes money off the table.
The fourth repair to take a pass on is if you're working on something where the diamond,
usually the center stone or a sizable side stone is chipped. Even if you take it in and
you call it out and you show the client and you got images and whatnot, stay away. The
stone is already damaged. Anything you do to it certainly can't improve the condition.
And the hard part about being away from your ring is that the memory isn't reliable and
when you return it to the client and I've witnessed this in a showroom, they don't remember the
chip being that obvious and that big and now it comes down to a false accusation of your
work ethics and your talent and your ability and your integrity. You chipped my diamond
more. You're already the enemy. What are you going to do? Are you going to show them photos?
Are you going to get your millimeter measurement out? Are you going to say but you signed off
that I assume no risk whatsoever? It's a downward spiral. So just say no upfront.
If you've ever had to enamel something, you know that if you screw it up, you better end
up drilling it all out and starting fresh. If you come across a repair that has cracked
enamel, putting more enamel on top of it and refusing it, whether it's cold enamel or heat
activated enamel, it's not going to go well. It's not going to look right. The colors won't
match. The textures won't match. You run the risk of creating an uneven surface. This is
another situation where you're better off passing on it and letting the client trust
that you have discernment than to just say yes to everything. If you don't have a strong
no, then you're not going to have a strong yes. And those zones need to be really obvious
and clear in the world of repair, not just for yourself, but for the clients as well.
Nothing is more irritating than giving up your ring for repair, getting it back, having the
repair work fail and having to turn it back into the shop and being away from it again.
For the repair artist, oftentimes if you have to redo a repair, it's free of charge. So
now you're losing time and you're not making money and you could have done it right the
first time, but now you're doing it over. And we hope that the second time is the winner.
Taking in a crazed opal or an opal with cracks through it is a losing battle. Even if you
decided I'm not really going to work on it, let me just polish this up. It's fragile enough
that once those crackles are running through a stone, even the vibration of a polishing
machine could worsen the condition. This is a situation where even if gemstones aren't
part of your goldsmithing repertoire, loop these stones, meaning put them under magnification,
do your diligence. And if there's anything that even strikes you as mildly problematic,
take it off your plate. Hand it back and say that you're not comfortable with the risk
associated with this repair. Next, clients will ask you to do things that
are fantastical in nature. One of the requests that a client had for me was, I left my pearls
on a table, I knocked over some wine, and now they're stained. Can you bleach these
for me? Now that seems simple enough. We're all familiar with bleaching stains out of
things. We all know that pearls are porous. However, that doesn't mean that grabbing
a cup of Clorox and putting somebody's precious necklace in there is the best of ideas. If
the pearls are stained, this is a time to take it to somebody, again, who's been doing
this hundreds of times and is an expert versus you giving it a good college try. And let's
not forget, most pearls are on knotted or unknotted silk, which is a fabric that's going to break
down in harsh chemicals. Overly tarnished sterling. Now this is something
that's great as a do it yourself project on a rainy day, if it's your own stuff. And there
are plenty of hacks out there. You can get on YouTube nowadays and find all of the little
tricks and tips. But bringing overly tarnished jewelry into a jewelry store and asking for
it to be polished is really a waste of time. And the cost won't be justified. There's
simply too much labor put into bringing it up to a reasonable level of shine. If it's
hyper oxidized, there are ways to take that down a few levels and then present it to a
jeweler. The last jeweler I know, who had to restore overly tarnished jewelry back to
its original condition was so upset with the project that he charged $250 a piece. That's
more than the amount of sterling as jewelry that the object was in the first place.
Costume jewelry. This is a mixed bag because you really don't know how it's going to behave.
Sometimes you get lucky. It's a quick fix with some crazy glue and you're out the door
because it's just plastic on plastic. Other times, costume jewelry really hasn't been
assembled the way that your jeweler slash goldsmith brain works. So you're the wrong
tool for the job. There was a woman who brought in all of her costume jewelry to me and said,
I'll do anything. I don't care what the cost is. I'm madly in love with these pieces,
etc, etc. The jump rings aren't closed. These aren't held together in any specific order
that makes sense. The components are fragile and breakable because they're synthetics
and they're cheaper materials. Your best solution is to just have a complete straight
talk with yourself and guide the client to do the same. Either find somebody who specializes
in repairing nonprecious jewelry or understand that this jewelry was not built to last and
is fast fashion, which means it's time to let it go and dispose of it.
My intention for this episode was to pay it forward, just like my colleagues and trainers
did for me. Learn from our mistakes, make better choices, and in the end, serve the client
and foster that relationship.