How is Brian Gavin custom jewelry made?

Hi Danny, I’ve been looking at the different styles of halo settings that Brian Gavin has available in their online catalogue, and while they are all beautiful, none of them happen to be exactly what my girlfriend wants, thus I’m wondering how is Brian Gavin custom jewelry made? I’ve been reading about the art of lost wax carving to create custom jewelry, is this how Brian Gavin custom jewelry is designed? How much does it cost to have an engagement ring custom designed? What sort of time frame is involved? And how can we be assured that we’re going to like the final outcome of our custom design project? – Alex B.

Using the art of lost wax carving to create custom jewelry is certainly an option which is relied upon by a lot of jewelers, however at Brian Gavin the majority of custom jewelry designs are created using Computer Aided Design (CAD) which enables us to create jewelry designs which are much more precise, detailed, and more symmetrical than tends to be possible when carving a ring from a block of wax.

Benefits of Computer Aided Design for Jewelry:

One of the major benefits of using CAD to design jewelry is the ability to create renderings of what the finished ring will look like, based upon the current stage of design, thereby enabling our clients to see what the piece of jewelry will look like before moving forward with the project. The image provided aboveshows a custom halo ring design that we are currently working on, the CAD program provides us with top down, through finger, and side profile perspectives.

While the software and training programs which are necessary to design and manufacture jewelry using Computer Aided Design are pretty expensive, the price of having a ring custom designed is actually more affordable than you might imagine, especially if the design is based upon a ring which we already have in production.

One major advantage of using CAD to design jewelry is that the ring design will be symmetrical, whereas there are always minor differences between two sides of a ring when the wax has been carved from hand. Another advantage is that if the wax breaks for any reason, for instance if you were to visit our office to inspect the wax and happened to snap it while trying it on your finger, we would just have to schedule the machine to cut another wax, not start carving the entire ring over from scratch!

What do the different colors on a CAD model represent?

During the jewelry design process, our custom jewelry designers use different colors to distinguish sections of the ring design from other elements of the design. In the screenshot of the ring that appears to the right, the color orange represents the ring shank, the color purple is used for elements of the crown structure, the colors red and yellow are used to highlight the trim sections, and the color green is used for the prong structure. The different colors also help our clients to identify different design elements…

Rendering a Ring in CAD to see what it will look like:

Once the custom ring design has been finished using CAD, we can use the program to create a 3d rendering of the ring to provide you with a picture of what the finished ring will look like. The rendering provided to the left, shows what the CAD sketch of the ring featured at the beginning of this blog post will look like as a finished piece of jewelry. The only thing that the program cannot fully account for are things like prong height and finish; but as you can see, even the diamonds produced by the rendering software look pretty life-like, and we can provide images of the ring from several different vantage points to provide you with multiple views.

Thus as you can see, the process for having a custom ring designed by Brian Gavin is pretty straightforward and simple, so if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for in our extensive collection of Brian Gavin Signature engagement rings, we can always make it for you.