What is CAD in jewellery design?
You may be surprised to hear that most wholesale jewellery today is designed on computers using advanced jewelry design software called CAD.
What is CAD?
CAD is a Computer aided design software used to create jewellery items. CAD does not completely replaces traditional techniques of making masters by hand but rather used in jewellery manufacturing to cut the costs, to create masters of jewellery items that have been hollowed out to cut gold content (otherwise their manufacturing would be almost impossible) and to save gold wastage created by filling and off cuts. But there are other reasons as well. CAD produces images in a number of different angles as well as the rendered image allowing both the designer and the customer to visualise the final design and make necessary alterations before any manufacturing is started.
From CAD to life
Once the design has been approved by the customer it will be printed in wax using 3D printer, a form of additive manufacturing technology where a three dimensional object is created by successive layers of material, in this case wax.
This wax model that has been created is used to cast the jewellery item in the required metal and the correct size. To finish the process the item is filled, buffed and pre-polished to a high standard and then hallmarked. All the jewellery in silver above 7.75 gram, gold 1 gram and platinum above 0.5 gram in weight should be hallmarked. After the hallmarking process the item will be stone set (if necessary) and given a final polish.
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