A common jewelry repair is re-tipping the prongs that hold stones in their mountings. Re-tipping is most commonly needed on gold rings, as they experience the most wear and tear. It is important for you as a jewelry owner to keep an eye on your pieces, and make sure the settings are healthy. This includes checking for visible cracks anywhere on the mounting, missing or worn prongs, and especially missing stones. A missing stone means the extra expense of replacing the stone, in addition to the damaged prongs. Hopefully, we can help you avoid this extra cost by educating you on when it is time to re-tip or replace your prongs.
Healthy prongs should looks like the ones in this illustration.
From both the top and the sides, these prongs have an adequate amount of metal to hold the stone securely in place.
The illustration below shows a prong that is worn primarily from the top. This type of wear can be repaired by re-tipping the prong. Re-tipping involves flowing solder onto the top of the prong, to build it back up. Re-tipping is generally only possible on pieces holding diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. These are the only stones that will withstand the heat of the torch during the repair (more on this in a later post).
In this image, the prong has been worn primarily from the side. Wear such as this requires a full prong replacement.
A prong replacement involves sawing off the old prong at the base and soldering on a new one.
Another thing to look for are lifted prongs. This can occur if the prong was not set correctly and in wearing the piece the defective prong snags on clothing or any number of other things.
take a close look at your jewelry to see if you can see any of these problems. If you do, bring it to Custom so we can give you our expert opinion and fix any problems correctly.