The Art of True Custom Design

The origins of the lost wax process are shrouded in antiquity, but it has been used for thousands of years to produce objects in metal which could not be produced any other way, due to the complexity of their form. It permits anything that can be modeled in wax to be faithfully transmuted into metal and is still used today for certain industrial parts, dental restorations, fine jewelry, and sculpture.

Roemer Originals uses the lost wax process to create your one-of-a-kind piece of fine jewelry.

To begin the process of custom designing a piece of jewelry, we start with examples, photographs, or sketches of a piece with the dimensions and description laid out for the carver to follow.

Our waxes are hand carved by the finest artisans in the industry. The carvers are extremely gifted artists with years of training and experience. The addition of CAD/CAM technology has been added to the jewelry design industry in this past decade. For extremely intricate pieces that require extreme precision, we have the CAD/CAM machine carve the piece and then the rest is finished by hand. This also works well for any type of insignia, crest, or logo pieces that the customer would like to duplicate.

Carving the wax

The finished wax carving

After the piece has been carved, it is then placed onto a wax support called a sprue and into a flask. A mixture called investment (kind of like a plaster of paris material) is poured around it. Once the investment has dried and hardened around the piece, the flask is then placed into the kiln for the wax burnout. It takes about 6 hours at 1200 degrees for the wax to melt out, leaving the negative image in the investment mold.

After the burnout is complete, the flask is removed from the oven and placed into the casting machine where the metal (silver, gold, or platinum) is melted and forced into the investment mold either with the use of a vacuum or centrifugal casting machine.

The flask is then allowed to cool, and the plaster/investment mold is placed in water. The investment dissolves leaving only the metal piece of cast jewelry. The wax was melted out and the investment mold was washed away. This is why each and every piece is a one-of-a-kind original piece of art.

After the casting process, the piece is then placed into a tumbler to pre-polish and smooth out fine lines and imperfections. After a few hours of tumbling, the piece is then cleaned up and smoothed out a little more with hand tools and polishing compounds. The jeweler then sets all of the stones using different types of burs and hand tools to set and tighten them into the metal.

The rough metal casting before being cleaned up or setting the stones

Once he has set all of the stones, he then does the final cleanup of the ring with sanding disks and buffing compounds to bring the metal to high shine.

Voila!

A hand carved, hand finished, original piece of jewelry made especially, and very specifically for YOU.