Handcrafted Jewelry Gets Technical

The past decade has seen 3-D printers become a fixture in jewelry workshops around the world, where they work side by side with craftsmen who carve, mount, and solder pieces using traditional techniques Rather than competing with traditional jewelry manufacturing, 3-D printing has become a tool to bolster the human hand Even in Graff's Mayfair headquarters, where some of the world's most important diamonds and gemstones are meticulously set in one- of-a-kind pieces, the 3-D printer is embraced.

Sam Sherry, Graff 's head of technology, cites the brand's diamond-encrusted Snowfall watch as a prime example of 3-D printing's benefits "The Snowfall has hundreds of pieces that all need to be exactly the same; to produce such a fine network of shapes in wax for each watch would be impossible Human nature is biased, but 3-D printing evens out those biases" For New York-based jeweler Jordan Askill, 3-D printing is part of the creative process: "I use the technology almost like a paintbrush as a way to see my visions in reality" Many of his designs involve realistic figures like panthers and sharks that, if rendered by hand, "Would not have the hyperreal quality that is important to my work" In all of these scenarios, 3-D printing is used to build a preliminary model that is then made by hand. Source