For centuries goldsmiths and silversmiths have labored to use hand tools and heat on gold and silver to create beautiful works of art for Royalty. And they had to learn how to create mechanisms that would hold colorful gems in place to add glitter and detail to their work.
If you were to travel to London to the see the historic collection of crowns from the royal Family, you would see this very interesting and detailed progression of skills being applied to the increasingly popular use of diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies in each crown. Jewelers would often work for years on coronation crowns, scepters and all the adornments that surround such momentous occasions.
In fact, a jeweler could spend an entire lifetime working slowly and steadily on just a few items. One can only imagine the agony over mistakes, the stress of trying to please a patron who might change their minds about design and gemstone arrangements every few years as you are slowly toiling away, the dread and anticipation that came with the revealing – hoping your patron would love what you had made because the alternative carried severe consequences.
These days your jeweler works at seemingly lightening speed by comparison. Creating custom jewelry pieces that are one-of-a-kind takes four to six weeks. And minor jewelry repairs happen in days. One of the things that has completely revolutionized the craft of precious metal smithing in the last 20 years is the use of the Laser Welder.
This space-age piece of equipment uses a beam of light shown through a Yag Garnet to create a laser beam we are all familiar with, thanks to the Star Wars movies. This allows the jeweler to create intensive heat in microsecond bursts that are much more controlled and targeted to the spot being repaired, thus providing greater protection to delicate designs and gems in close proximity.
This targeted use of heat was a bombshell break-thru in the jewelry industry that suddenly allowed jewelers to repair very old jewelry, including costume jewelry that usually was discarded once broken. Over the last ten years that has allowed jewelers to preserve countless works of art that span 1900-50, when even brass and copper were used to make jewelry designs that were economical for the average person.
Even now jewelers are continuing to learn all the odd ways that the technology of the Laser Welder can be applied. Such as repairs of broken stethoscopes for doctor’s offices, eyeglass frame repairs, cracked gun sights, old tiaras used for multi-generational celebrations, damaged spurs and even filling pits in titanium dies.
We’ve only begun to scratch the surface on ways to use lasers to create unique surface finishes or patterns on the surface of gold, silver, and platinum. And the best news of all? The weld joints created by a laser welder are eight times stronger than a solder joint created by using a traditional jeweler’s soldering torch.
This bond is about the best kind of “glue” you could create for delicate, wearable works of art. While you pay a few dollars more for the technology, the payback in greater longevity for your jewelry more than makes up for the upfront cost. Because it is a newer application in the jewelry industry, you may have to seek out jewelers who use laser welders, but you will find them to be knowledgeable and happy to help you preserve your family and community heirlooms.
It’s truly a wonder to see how modern technology has been applied so successfully to preserving an ancient art form and making it possible for each new generation to continue to master this craft.
Keri Satterlee
Satterlee Jewelry Repair
& Design Center
541.548.8788
