"What's That? We Can't Hear You!"
CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!
If you call the shop, there’s a good chance that’s the sound happening in the background.
CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!
It’s just Jim, hammering away at metal. Because no matter how delicate and shiny and perfect metal looks in your ring or earrings or favorite bug brooch from Jim, it all takes a beating on the way to its tiny perfection!
Silver, gold, and platinum are all called precious metals, because they are relatively scarce and have high economic value compared to most other metals. During the electronics age, as manufactures work to create smaller and smaller circuit boards and electronics, rare earth metals like gadolinium, holmium, lutetium, and neodymium are used to create computer memory, cell phones, magnets, and more. But those metals are usually sold as oxides, which looks like a powder or salt. Silver, gold, and platinum are typically sold as grains (small droplets) or sheet.
From there, Jim uses a few different processes to turn those raw forms of metal into jewelry. He can bend it with pliers and his hands, squish it by running it through a rolling mill or extruding it through a pressure die, or hammer it!
Precious metals aren’t naturally easy to work with. For one thing, they have memory. This means that they want to retain the shape that they’re in. It takes a lot of heat and pressure to force metal to take on a new memory (CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!). Also, sometimes metal has a mind of its own. Any jeweler will tell you that sometimes, when you’re working a metal design, the metal applies its own opinion to the final product. Sometimes the jeweler fights it, so he can end up with the design he envisioned, and sometimes he goes with it and ends up with something unexpected and exciting. Of course, in much of Jim's work, he's trying to stay true to the anatomical details of his little creatures, in which case, he really has to work hard to come to agreement with the metal. No room for interpretation there!
The sound of a hammer is just one of the many sounds of a working jewelry shop. We joke about it here, but honestly, it’s one of the great things about working at Designs in Gold. The sound of a hammer on metal means that sooner than you may expect, there will be a new creation waiting for final polish and introduction to the cases. So next time you’re in, listen for the hammer! That’s the sound of something beautiful being made.
