Gold Plating and Enamel

I feel so bad that I am always asking questions, but not yet experienced enough to answer many!!! I am just starting to send my wax designs to a casting house. I want to enamel parts of the pieces after. They don’t cast in copper, and sterling silver is too expensive to do all of my pieces in. So I was thinking of doing brass and having it gold plated. They offer a service of plating in 9k gold. Can I enamel on this? I can’t seem to find an answer anywhere on the web. I see some jewelry companies out there offer brass or gold plated brass enamel jewelry, and it baffles me how they do it. I have been told enamel will just pop off of brass.

Have it nickel plated first before you gold plate it otherwise the gold plate will fuse into the brass.

Some like to plate copper on brass, then nickel plate and then gold plate.
Nickel sticks better to copper then to brass.

Best regards

I used to work for a company that made enameled nursing pins and class rings in both precious and non precious metals. The pieces we made were die struck. Not cast.
If you asking if you can enamel on gold plated brass, the answer is “No”. Plating after enamel… yes. But you should use gilder’s brass for enameling. Also you will have to copper, then nickel plate the brass before gold plating.
Hope this helps.
Have fun and make lots of jewelry.
Jo Haemer
www.timothywgreen.com

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I’ve also noticed some costume jewelry makers calling things enamel (or sometimes even “cold enamel”) but it’s just colored resin. You can get nice effects doing this too, and you can definitely apply resin to gold-plated metals.

Maybe this cold enamel is what is confusing me! That definitely cleared things up for me. Thanks!!! I will look more into that.

Hi! You are such a help in this community. You helped me on my very first question here. I really appreciate it. The plating seems like it will be a big cost and a lot of time, but it’s great to have an answer! I think I will stick to enamel on sterling.

Thanks so much! Now that you have told me about this, I have found some valuable information on the metals fusing into each other. It’s a bit more clear.