One of my best restorations
14th August 2022 - Customer location: Cairns
The restored Onyx and 9ct rose gold ring
This ring I quoted to restore back in early 2022. In July the customer came back to me to have the work done. As far as restorations go it turned out as good as I could have possibly hoped. The icing on the cake was that the customer loved the result as well. Lets have a look at the restoration process.
The worn out bezel
The damaged bezel on the ring prior to restoration/
When the ring first came to me there were two main issues. The first was that the top bezel that secured the onyx was very worn. I am not sure if they cut the corners out at setting or if they had worn away.
When you cut those corners out of the bezel it helps avoid any chance of damaging the corners of the onyx during setting. When I restored the ring as you can see from the previous photo, I enclosed the corners for greater protection.
The band keeps breaking
Broken join from a previous repair to the ring
The next issue with the ring was that the band kept on breaking. At one stage it had been re-shanked to restore width to the band but without thickness in the ring it was always going to break again. The ring should have been restored back then, not re-shanked.
The thickness of the ring at the sides not enough to support the join.
On the left you can see where one of the joins for the re-shank has broken. The top part of the ring is not thick enough for the join to be able to solder strongly too. The thinner a ring is the more it is also prone to bending out of shape and putting joins under stress. Exactly what had happened here.
To the right of the ring you can see a plate soldered into the inside of the ring which would be an important part of this restoration.
Preserving the hallmarks from the original band.
Hallmarked section of he ring preserved before it was re-shanked.
That plate is a section of the very original band that contained the hallmarks.. They preserved these and also used them to reinforce the band on one side where they re-shanked it.
This ring is a rose gold alloy. Rose golds are formed by increasing the amount of copper added to the alloy. This copper makes rose golds more prone to oxidisation than yellow golds. That is the tarnishing you can see on the inside of this ring…..as well as a very messy join performed by the previous jeweller.
Determining the new finger size
Silver band connect to allow for sizing prior to restoration.
The old ring was too large so the size needed to be reduced. To confirm the correct size I attached a temporary silver band so that we could modify the ring to determine the prefect size. The onyx was removed prior to this to avoid any damage to it.
Fixing the inside of the ring
The inside of the restored ring
The inside of the original ring had a very fine/sharp edge. I widened that internal edge as well as making the band thicker. The result was that the weight of the ring went from 4.7 grams in its broken state to 10.1 grams restored. A touch over double the initial weight
The addition of this extra gold during the restoration will give it a much longer second life. Most of the issues that occurred with this ring were due it being made too thin in the first place.
The final touch for this restoration was to place the old hallmarked section of the original band nicely into the inside of the ring.