Hello everyone,
Again I have doubts!
I am unsure of how much metal grain to order for making two wedding rings with a strip of yellow gold and white gold.
The goal is to create a 19.2k alloy by combining 18k and 24k gold.
I have calculated the amount of metal required for the final product, but I am unsure about the additional metal needed to cast an ingot, roll it into a sheet, and cut strips for the wedding rings.
- How much extra metal should I order to account for this? Is there a way to calculate this or should I order a certain percentage more?
The wedding bands should end up being approximately 6gr of yellow gold and 11gr of white gold.
I’ll be casting a round ingot and I have a combined rolling mill to transform it after. Starting with a 4mm round wire and ending up with a 1.8mm thickness sheet with 1.3mm height for yellow gold and 2.7mm height for white gold. I also have a rectangle draw plate that might help for the initial form shapeshift I need from round to rectangle.
The price of gold greatly affects the order cost and quote for my customers.
Thank you in advance for all your contributions and for sharing your knowledge with me!
I have searched this forum with various keywords, but I have not found any relevant information. I apologize if I missed any similar topics.
Wish you all a great day!
Hi,
…perhaps fabricate the rings in silver, weigh them, covert the silver weight to gold using their specific gravities…then add tge weight of the button needed…
julie
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I’ve been working through a similar issue making gold engagement rings. Granted they are a bit more complex than a plain band because I needed to fabricate settings but I found if I tried to be really frugal with the gold purchasing it made life really difficult to do the fabrication work. I came to the conclusion that to work effectively as a goldsmith I had to get comfortable with the idea I’d have plenty of offcuts, scrap and lemel lying around the shop, and that it would eventually make it’s way back into other work via remelting or into my wallet via refining. It needs to be thought of as a cash flow issue ultimately.
My general rule of thumb now is to have twice as much as I need for a job, but when pricing the job I only charge the customer for what is in the ring, plus a healthy material markup of about 50%, plus my labour fee (including all time spent designing, communicating etc). I know that extra material is eventually going to make it’s way back into my pocket.
Sorry that doesn’t answer your question directly, but it might provide an interesting reframing. I’d be curious to hear how others deal with this issue as I’m pretty new to the game.
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Hello Julie,
I was trying to avoid doubling the production time. I understand this is one of the best ways to understand the quantity of metal you need, but it would make me take longer.
I was wondering if for this method of producing manually, we had a “standard” like for instance, when you cast you should add at least 20% more for the button, it could be a reference like this.
Thank you for your suggestion.
Wish you a great day!
Hello Alex,
I had a similar situation recently with other wedding rings, but as the design was much more complex, I vacuum-cast them. I ordered double the metal needed for the rings, and I worked out that amount within my value, so basically I had less free money for myself, but it was all billed to the customer. This was justified because of the complexity of the design, but with simple wedding bands, we cannot charge the same amount of design and making fees to include the double of the material, especially when we’re talking about 18k and 24k to make 19.2k gold.
I know it also depends on our way of making and fabricating the rings, but I guess that I’ll order at least 50% more, and that should do it. Worst-case scenario, I’ll make one wedding band at a time.
Thank you for sharing your experiences,
Wish you a great day!
1 Like
Having extra metal lying around should not be a problem… what’s left over can always be reused for your next order…but you shouldn’t charge for the left overs, if you mark up materials costs… a cheaper way to buy gold could be buying gold bullion coins… bullion 22k coins like kruggerrands are 19.67% gold, the rest being copper… only a small weight% or atom% of copper is necessary to bring the alloy down to 19.2k, or 80% gold. 24k coins include canadian maple leaf, austrian philharmonics, US gold eagles… The premium for common modern bullion coins at are sold not much more than at bullion value. might be cheaper than buying grain gold. philharmonics are sold in 1/10, 1/4 up to 1 ounce sizes…US gold coins have a much higher premium. Portuguese gold is 80%… or 19.2k… some comparative shopping could land you the least premium over gold value…I bought a stash of gold coins when the price of gold bottomed out at $250 an ounce… that was over 25 years ago… I have more gold than I need now…the only way to buy and sell gold at spot price is to hold fine gold bars in a brokerage account. Some investment banks, like Morgan Stanley will buy gold bars in your account. There’s a storage fee that’s minimal… you can take delivery of the physical gold but will have to pay shipping and insurance…if you do that, 10 one ounce bars are worth more than one 10 ounce bar… the one ounces have higher demand and are more liquid… buying one ten ounce bar and taking delivery will set you up for a long time supply of fine gold… don’t buy GLD…or other gold ETF’s… you can’t take delivery.
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I know that having extra gold lying around is an investment toward the future, but the problem is that I don’t have the money to invest in it right now, and the price of gold is way high too!
I always try to work with customers gold, but now, there has been a wave of customers that don’t have jewels to recycle or don’t want to recycle anything they have.
It maybe doesn’t help too, that I only work with either certified recycled, fairminded, or fairtrade gold, which makes the prices a little bit higher than regular gold, but also more difficult to have all the adjacent metals being the same source to make the different alloys the customers want.
It’s a bit overwhelming sometimes.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and suggestions.
I’m still unsure about what I’ll do.
Probably I’ll make some samples in silver adding only 20% of material to see if I can manage. They’re really simple wedding bands, so I think that it will be fairly easy to achieve the desired rectangular shape with ease with the rolling mill and that I won’t need to have much more metal than that.