Re-use and recycle your silver, gold or platinum for jewellery...

We're often asked whether we can use your gold, silver or platinum to make something new, sometimes in bespoke design projects. Here’s my view as to some key things to know. As Jacobs in-house master goldsmith, I love working on these projects in our in-house workshop!  Re-making old jewellery that's been given/handed down by a family member is a great way of making something new out of items that have a special emotional connection to you or your family. Some considerations to make are:

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Economical: Using your own metal can often be less than you may expect to have a new item produced. This does depend on what you have and the design itself. There are a lot of variables to balance - complex designs may need a lot of craft hours to make using re-used gold, compared to brand new ready-made items. You can always ask us to quote first. 

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Hand-crafted: Having something commissioned that is hand-made is a really special way to create a one off piece of jewellery created by a talented craftsperson.

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Eco-friendly: Re-using metal, whether its gold, silver or even platinum (sometimes - tricky to melt) means you know the exact provenance of the metal.

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Amount of metal: sometimes we have to add metal to a mix to have enough material to work with. When we melt your items down, some elements from the alloy may bubble/ burn off when heated resulting in reduced volume to work with. 

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Quality of alloy: because we’re heating and cooling a small batch, the ability to regulate pressure and quality in the metal isn’t the same as in a large scale manufacturing process (used for new pieces).  This may lead to a slightly less strong metal compared to starting afresh. This may be more or less important depending on the design you’ve chosen. Often customers are happy with this given the sentimental aspect mentioned above. 

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Mixing alloys: many clients have a mix of jewellery that they'd like to re-use - 9ct, 14ct and 18ct gold for example. Whilst these can be mixed, it does result in a less good alloy, and would be hallmarked at the lowest quality, rounded down as it were.

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Part exchanging: sometimes, when factoring all the above in, it makes more sense to use existing jewellery in part exchange against brand new - this provides peace of mind as to reliability and durability of the metal. Some of our clients think about it as transferring the emotional value of a piece into another, newer one.

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Contact us for more information and for indicative pricing. Projects like this can take anytime from 3 weeks onwards.