How 3D Printers are Helping Jewelers Make Gorgeous Custom Pieces

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Originally Posted On: How 3D Printers are Helping Jewelers Make Gorgeous Custom Pieces | Tech Times

Jewelry design has remained relatively unchanged for a number of centuries, but the digital revolution dramatically altered the process. For centuries, when a jeweler wanted to create a new design, they carved a model into wax by hand until they had a mock-up they could use to cast a piece of precious metal. As one might imagine, computer aided design software displaced these techniques as soon as personal computer prices dropped to a reasonable level.

The advent of affordable 3D printers is turning this digital paradigm on its head, however. Jewelry designers who draft designs as CAD files are increasingly printing their material out in wax, and the end result mirrors the methods used by artists of the Italian Renaissance. These wax models are being used to create some stunning new pieces that wouldn’t be possible using hand wax carving.

Once a jeweler has exported a CAD file into a format understood by a 3D printer, they’re free to print a piece of wax that can be cast in a plaster mold and then filled with gold, silver or platinum. This is far more precise than simply using CAD drawings to mold a piece of jewelry, yet it doesn’t add significantly to the cost. While fine jewelry is normally known for having very generous margins, the fact that this process can actually improve precision while decreasing overall costs has altered the market somewhat.

It’s now become affordable for some mid-range firms to offer supplies of wholesale jewelry for sale, which wouldn’t have previously been possible. In general, wholesale products either consisted of fine designs that fetched prices somewhat similar to what they would at public auction or damaged pieces that were being sold primarily for their melt value. Buyers of wholesale designs are quickly finding that they’re priced more affordably then they have been in years, which has allowed some small-to-medium sized resellers to turn around and offer these products to individual consumers.

As the prices of 3D printers have fallen, they’ve become more common commodities that could find their way into an office that once managed little more than a jewelry firm’s desktop publishing and needs. The fact that these devices are also more compatible than they once were is also helping to make it possible for even the smallest individual artists to put out new pieces of bespoke finery.

There was a time when a prospective jeweler wouldn’t have even been able to connect a 3D printer to a commercial grade desktop PC because of a lack of supported drivers. According to jewelry industry insiders, most designers use standard commodity workstations to do CAD drawings on. While the hardware in question is usually much more sophisticated than what someone might need for an average household machine, it still isn’t too radically different in terms of architecture. Printer firmware files would have struggled to interface with it for some time.

Another major issue is that even if these organizations could get a particular 3D printer to work, it would have primarily produced designs that used a form of plastic instead of wax. This wouldn’t have been useful for those making high-end designs because there’s always the risk that a sprue or some other hanging piece of material would have spoiled the geometry of a piece of jewelry.

The advent of open-source firmware drivers have made it possible for CAD artists to pass nearly anything over to a 3D printer using a standard protocol like USB or USB-C, and a greater amount of the hardware currently on the market supports the use of wax as a printing substrate. That’s allowed some intrepid artists to create custom pieces of jewelry using 3D printers.

Hobbyists have been producing their own 3D printed jewelry for some time, but much of this doesn’t hold up to the same standards that one might hold a piece of finery to. While it could be an interesting experiment to make a piece in this way, it wouldn’t normally be an appealing option to art collectors. A few enterprising do-it-yourselfers have been able to produce a homemade engagement ring using this technique, but this level of virtuosity is rather rare.

Over time, artists have switched over to using wax printing techniques, which has enabled them to produce custom pieces in an affordable fashion. Clients might simply contact a particular jeweler and outline what they’re looking for. The jeweler might then sketch it out and do a single one-off casting job. Once they’re done, consumers can receive a professionally-made piece at a fraction of the price that they once would have.

Perhaps most impressive is the fact that many of these pieces are likely to appreciate in value as time goes on, which has ensured that even the most skeptical are now paying close attention to these trends.