Engagement Rings
Handmaking

A handmade engagement ring is a beautiful and detailed piece of workmanship involving many stages and skilled craftsmen.

The first stage of an engagement ring is of course the design. Harriet, Antoinette, Rebecca and Alice combine their skill, design flair and experience with their client's own ideas, style and budget to produce the final working engagement ring design sketch.

Next the metal is sourced from a bullion dealer, arriving in either basic shapes such as sheet and wire or in precast shapes. Often it is necessary to work, for example, the wire into smaller shapes and this is done by pulling it through drawing plates or squeezing sheet through a mill (like a heavy duty mangle). Or occasionally we melt down gold to form the engagement ring's basic shape.

First to be formed is the collet - the part of the engagement ring that holds the stones. Tools such as collet punches, saws and hammers are used in this highly skilled and difficult process. Many collets are designed and handmade to exactly match the contours of a particular stone. Regularly the metal is annealled - heated to a very high temperature using a jeweller's flame then treated in "pickle", a dilute sulphuric acid mixture to remove surface oxidisation. If the engagement ring is in platinum or gold and the collet is a particularly difficult shape, a silver master may be made first and then cast in the more expensive metal to avoid wastage

The shank is now formed by hammering it around a ring mandrel and joined onto the collet - not as easy as it sounds! It is particularly tricky to fit them together straight and square whilst keeping the shank exactly circular and to a specific ring size. The joints are made with intense heat and hallmark quality solder of the same metal type as the ring

Next is the rather time consuming process of filing then fine filing then sanding with emery paper and finally polishing paper until the engagement ring is more or less formed

In the UK it is a legal requirement that all precious metal jewellery is hallmarked with the maker's mark, date, metal type and place of Assay. Our work is at this stage hallmarked in London with the letters HK in a slightly rounded rectangular box - the inspiration of the HKJD logo. Engagement rings are tested by the London Assay Office for the purity of the metal - anything else present and the engagement ring is returned crushed!!

Next the stone is set into the engagement ring. Small amounts of metal are pushed up over the stone using specialist tools and making sure that the stone is balanced and secure within the setting. The engagement ring will need more finishing to be made ready for polishing.

Hand engraving is the next stage with special swan-neck engravers for those tricky letters inside of the shank. Finally, polishing is done with a polishing wheel and polishing compound eg rouge - rather a messy process but wonderful to see the finished engagement ring emerging.

Our workshop is open to the public and you can see our gold and silversmiths at work