Hello friends,
Looking for some input and education on this. It came in for repair and two of the tips had snapped off allowing the entire diamond to fall out. Obviously I’m inspecting to determine the root cause of the issue so it doesn’t happen again. The ring is about a year old, not sold by us originally. There does not appear to be any chlorine damage, and no excessive porosity in the casting. The only potential issue I see is that this setting does not appear to have been done correctly, with the prongs being undercut. Please confirm my thoughts or correct me with your own input. Thank you!
Hello,
is this setting a cast piece? cast prongs can be more prone to breakage, i believe…?
perhaps the claws caught on something and were pulled up/ off…?
there do not appear to be seats cut per say, but the prong depth at “the seat” appears to be more that 50% and a bit thin and the claws were bent 45 degrees at that thin point, possibly creating further metal weakness there
was the original stone a pear shape? i see a “relief hole in one prong and can also see that the profile/ thickness at the break point of that particular prong was quite thin…?
curious
julie
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Hi, yes the whole ring was one cast so that tracks. I suspect the prongs were caught and pulled but looking for potential weaknesses so we can avoid it again. The ring is reportedly about a year old so ideally this shouldn’t have happened so soon. The original cut was instead a pear, so that makes sense with the front prong snapped if that relief hole helped cause weakness. I think your comments are likely spot on, thanks for the input. Let me know if you have anything further.
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The other thing to add to Julie’s comments is that it’s possible that the prongs were filed or ground too much on the outside. That would make them thin as well.
What kind of stone was in there?
Jeff
That could be true. It was a pear cut lab-grown diamond. Either way part of the reason behind the post was dtermining if a whole new crown was necessary or if we could just redo those two prongs. At this point I think its fair to say a new crown is the best route even though its not particularly old.
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A new crown should be added. And in my opinion…
I never really trust pear and marquis crowns that are wire only. Let alone a cast crown. They are too prone to failure and the wire prongs are often not up to protecting the pointy bits. I always go with a solid V cap. Cut the seat in the vcap, and drill out just a little relief hole with a small ball burr so that the tip will be free floating but held into place with the sides of the Vcap. This reduces the odds of the tip being broken. I would also recommend using a platinum crown. Much longer life span with plat.
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Based on the notch visible on the inside of this prong, it appears to me that the seat was “overcut”, to make it easier to bend the prongs.
The result of such an overcut seat is that it is an easy and quick way to set a stone, but the resulting prongs are extremely likely to do exactly what these prongs have done, sheer off.
The prongs below the seat appear quite solid, and I think one could “retip” the prongs successfully.
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A well made 1 year old ring should not break. From the picture, the seats are over cut. A new prong may take less labor than retipping all of the prongs. If not all, many will continue to break off. I hope the owner of the ring did not lose their diamond. At least the diamond was synthetic, stil big bucks natural would have meant big big big bucks!
