Gem Setting

The first-level Gem Setting course was offered at George Brown during the winter term and I took it over seven Saturdays for six hours each day. It was by far the most expensive jewellery course offered at the college and I had to purchase a number of tools that cost extra from the tuition. Overall I was very disappointed with the experience and definitely think that it should have been more hands-on for the 42 hours that were invested in it. Despite that feeling I wanted to post the projects I completed anyway since I've been doing so for all of my other courses. 

The rings we worked with were silver cast rings which were tumbled and had a rough finish.  These were provided to us by the instructor. The course focused strictly on the gem-setting technique and we weren't supposed to "waste time" finishing off the rings but I thought it would actually be a waste not to finish them once the cubic zirconia stones were set (which is the hard part). Since there was extra time during each class I went ahead and filed and polished the first three projects after setting the stone.

1.  Four-Claw Setting

We started with the four-claw setting which taught us to use high-speed steel burs, triangle files, and pumice wheels. It was a little unnerving trying to make bearing cuts into the silver claws to match the shape of the stone and secure it in place. The contact surface was extremely small between the bur and the claws. Several times as the bur was spinning it skid across the claw and nearly wrapped around my thumb - yikes! That would have been messy.


I also had a difficult time getting used to wearing the optivisor and eventually just used the lowest magnification available (1.5x) so that I wouldn't get disoriented every time I looked up from my bench pin to reach for a tool.


2.  Bezel Setting

For our second ring we learned about the bezel setting which I found to be easier than the four-claw. We still needed to use the high-speed steel bur but cutting a groove along the inner wall of the bezel was not nearly as daunting as trying to cut out even grooves in the four separate claws. There was a lot of hammering with this ring to displace the metal along the top of the setting which clamped the stone into place. I didn't mind all of that tapping though, probably because it felt like nothing compared to the intense hammering from my silversmith course with my copper bowls!



3.  Channel Setting
For the channel setting we used 156C Tungsten burs to cut out grooves in the channel wall. The spacing between the teeth of the 156C burs is tighter than the spacing for the high-speed steel ones which makes them less aggressive to use. This ring had only five stones but took me a few hours to set because of my inexperience.

After setting all of the stones into the silver ring by hand, we learned the technique of setting stones into wax. I didn't realized that rings could be cast with stones already in them but we learned that rubies, cubics, and blue sapphires are hard enough to withstand the heat from the casting process. Setting these stones into the wax ring gave us a direct comparison between the two techniques. Hand-setting took several hours (for an amateur like myself)...setting in wax took less than 10 minutes! Unfortunately not every design can be set in wax which is why the skill of gem-setting is still important.

4.  Gypsy or Flush Setting
Our last project was the gypsy setting with 13 small cubics. Needless to say this took some time to complete! Again it took me several hours to set in metal but only 15 minutes to do in wax. I didn't get a chance to polish this ring so it still has the brushed metal finish to it.











After completing this fourth project I do not feel at all prepared to try even a simple setting on my own at home. It's not that I expected to be a master gem-setter after only 6 weeks of courses but I thought the course was poorly taught and poorly organized.  I would not recommend it to anyone (and I'll leave it at that!)