G’day; regarding those so-called ‘fake’ settings. The
jeweller who showed me lots of things,(many, many years ago)
showed me how to do these. Having drilled a hole in the metal, he
used a little setting burr to make a cone shaped seat for the stone
to rest upon, with a little parallel portion above where the
girdle would be that was just a tad deeper than the girdle of the
stone in the hole. He used his graver to push up tiny curls of
metal, but emphasized that it wasn’t these that were to hold the
stone tightly in it’s resting place. He completed the setting in
the bit of scrap metal, then cut and sanded off the slivers of
metal completely, instead of using a beading tool to round them
off as is normal with this setting. He handed me his 5X loupe
and I could see that there were small rounds of metal protruding
beyond the setting hole just overlapping the girdle and holding
in the stone strongly. It was quite difficult to remove the
little diamond as the silver was to go into the scrap box after
the demonstration. And I have used that system very successfully
on occasion. But not alas, with diamonds. Cheers,
/\
/ /
/ / Johnb@ts.co.nz
/ /__|\
(_______) In sunny temperate Mapua NZ -
Autumn’s here…