Post by Lythe Featherblade on Feb 16, 2012 2:27:34 GMT
I've really had to wonder if I can trust my own instinct.
I just had my wedding ring resized recently, and when it was returned, I thought it felt light. When I showed it to my wife, she also felt it was light.
Now about my wedding ring, my wife made it 8 years ago. She carved it, had it cast, and then did the final polish, and steals it periodically to play with or occasinally polish it. She isn't a jeweler, but has training in a related field, and has made/repaired less than a dozen items of jewelry total. In short, she knows this ring better than I do, and doesn't have other items of jewelry to confuse it with.
The ring itself is solid 18k gold, and very heavy. The original weight was 19.5 grams (31.1 grams to the troy ounce). While we've never written that weight down, we used this ring to test her jewelry scale when she got it a few years ago, and have retested the weight since. This is a weight firmly ingrained in memory, along with the concept that the ring weighs in at just under 2/3 of a troy ounce (or just over 2/3 of a regular ounce which is 28.35 grams).
Closer examination of the ring after I got it back showed it had been ground out all the way around on the inside. When we retested it on the scale, it measured 3.32 grams lighter, which is just over 1/6th of the original weight of the ring. 3.32 grams may not sound like much, but when I looked up gold prices (18k gold is 75% gold, so I only counted the value of actual gold) I came to $140 worth pure gold.
For the resizing, the jeweler was supposed to cut it open and insert a piece to make it larger, going from a size 9.5 to a size 10.5. Sizing up this much is too much to just stretch with a stretcher. I had specificly stated I did not want it ground out. After asking him about it, he stated that he had needed to grind it to even it out after inserting the piece. He had not weight it before or after, so could not attest to its weight, but should not have removed any significant amount of gold.
Still curious, I did some math. I measured the ring on a mandril and found it was exactly size 10.5. The jeweler had measured it when I dropped it off and it had been exactly 9.5. Using those sizes, I calculated how big a cylinder would have to be removed via grinding to create that size difference. I then looked up the density of 18k gold and calculated the weight of removed gold to be 3.2 grams. This was far too close to my weighed differential value of 3.32 grams to be coincidence.
So far, everything backed up my initial conclusion that the ring had been ground out.
Today I managed to visit the jeweler again to settle this matter. Again he swore that he could not have removed that much gold. He also heated up the ring to show the solder joint where he had inserted a piece of gold, and showed me the matching chunk of gold where he had cut the inserted piece out.
Because as a jeweler reputation means everything to him, he gave me the difference in chunks of gold to settle the issue. But judging by how convicingly sincere and victimized he acted (not to mention the evidence of the solder joint), I really do not know if he was telling the truth, or if he was only covering his tracks and my original instinct was correct.
Does it seem farfetched that a jeweler would cut out a piece, refill it to the same width, and then grind out a ring for $140 worth gold? (the cost of the resizing for this was $40). Then again if there is no grinding, with the cut and insert method, the piece of gold inserted would have easily been worth $25-35 in raw value...
I just had my wedding ring resized recently, and when it was returned, I thought it felt light. When I showed it to my wife, she also felt it was light.
Now about my wedding ring, my wife made it 8 years ago. She carved it, had it cast, and then did the final polish, and steals it periodically to play with or occasinally polish it. She isn't a jeweler, but has training in a related field, and has made/repaired less than a dozen items of jewelry total. In short, she knows this ring better than I do, and doesn't have other items of jewelry to confuse it with.
The ring itself is solid 18k gold, and very heavy. The original weight was 19.5 grams (31.1 grams to the troy ounce). While we've never written that weight down, we used this ring to test her jewelry scale when she got it a few years ago, and have retested the weight since. This is a weight firmly ingrained in memory, along with the concept that the ring weighs in at just under 2/3 of a troy ounce (or just over 2/3 of a regular ounce which is 28.35 grams).
Closer examination of the ring after I got it back showed it had been ground out all the way around on the inside. When we retested it on the scale, it measured 3.32 grams lighter, which is just over 1/6th of the original weight of the ring. 3.32 grams may not sound like much, but when I looked up gold prices (18k gold is 75% gold, so I only counted the value of actual gold) I came to $140 worth pure gold.
For the resizing, the jeweler was supposed to cut it open and insert a piece to make it larger, going from a size 9.5 to a size 10.5. Sizing up this much is too much to just stretch with a stretcher. I had specificly stated I did not want it ground out. After asking him about it, he stated that he had needed to grind it to even it out after inserting the piece. He had not weight it before or after, so could not attest to its weight, but should not have removed any significant amount of gold.
Still curious, I did some math. I measured the ring on a mandril and found it was exactly size 10.5. The jeweler had measured it when I dropped it off and it had been exactly 9.5. Using those sizes, I calculated how big a cylinder would have to be removed via grinding to create that size difference. I then looked up the density of 18k gold and calculated the weight of removed gold to be 3.2 grams. This was far too close to my weighed differential value of 3.32 grams to be coincidence.
So far, everything backed up my initial conclusion that the ring had been ground out.
Today I managed to visit the jeweler again to settle this matter. Again he swore that he could not have removed that much gold. He also heated up the ring to show the solder joint where he had inserted a piece of gold, and showed me the matching chunk of gold where he had cut the inserted piece out.
Because as a jeweler reputation means everything to him, he gave me the difference in chunks of gold to settle the issue. But judging by how convicingly sincere and victimized he acted (not to mention the evidence of the solder joint), I really do not know if he was telling the truth, or if he was only covering his tracks and my original instinct was correct.
Does it seem farfetched that a jeweler would cut out a piece, refill it to the same width, and then grind out a ring for $140 worth gold? (the cost of the resizing for this was $40). Then again if there is no grinding, with the cut and insert method, the piece of gold inserted would have easily been worth $25-35 in raw value...
Just sorry to hear that it happened to you m8, cause of the simple fact, it will never be the same ring again. 