Every now and then I like to drag out the proverbial dead horse and beat the crap out of it, and tonight is the night. My wife calls me a techno peasant, my friends call me a luddite, and me, I just think I am “keepin’ it real. ”<\/p>\n
I am sure that there are a ton of people out there using CAD,\u00a0CNC and rapid prototyping to make their jewelery. Notice I didn’t say jewelers or goldsmiths.<\/p>\n
I think\u00a0these people are jewelry coordinators. They take a design and\u00a0make a file, then download it to a\u00a0CNC machine then the machine makes the piece- it even\u00a0does the bead and bright work and pre-seats the stones. Then they preset the stones in the wax and ship the wax off to a casting house where it is cast and then polished by machine and it is ready. Minimal human contact- that’s great if you are making plastic forks or toothbrushes, but we are making fine jewelry. I like to look at pieces made by other goldsmiths, I can admire the craftsmanship and can see the years of skill that went into making the piece, sometimes you can see where they struggled to set a stone or had to make a compromise to get the whole thing to work.<\/p>\n
When I look at most stuff made in the past 5 years or so, it is all\u00a0CADCAM,\u00a0CNC- it is so perfect. The designs are all melding together as well. Who would have thought that setting a couple hundred quarter pointers was a good idea? They must be pumpin’ this stuff out of factories in China and India because the retail price is roughly what the materials sell for. I have had the misfortune of working on this stuff, I am afraid to put it in the ultrasonic because all the stones will fall out and no amount of super glue will ever put them back in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I consider jewelry a craft, not an art. I am a craftsman, not an artist. Most artists wait tables and make art on the side. Craftsmen earn their living by their trade.\u00a0 I am gonna stop writing now and get out my fire retardant so I am not incinerated by the flames\u00a0that will probably be leaping off the dead horse that I have been kickin’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every now and then I like to drag out the proverbial dead horse and beat the crap out of it, and tonight is the night. My wife calls me a techno peasant, my friends call me a luddite, and me, I just think I am “keepin’ it real. ” I am sure that there are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/kevinpotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}