Nine of our eighteen people work at the bench, and most of them trained the long way round rather than at a college. Two came through apprenticeships in the old Cape Town trade, one retrained after twelve years as a dental technician, which turns out to be very close work indeed, and one started with us packing orders and asked to be taught. The mix is deliberate. People who arrive by different routes solve problems differently, and on a bench that matters more than a certificate on a wall.
At the Bench
Cape Town
Final Polish
Cape Town
Almost every piece we sell passes through four pairs of hands before it reaches the box, and each pair does one job properly rather than all four adequately. That is the oldest arrangement in the trade and there is still nothing better. It is slower than buying finished pieces in, and it is the reason we can resize a ring in an afternoon, re-solder a clasp while you wait, and tell you exactly who made the thing you are holding in your hand. Not many shops in the country can still say that.
The Four Bench Jobs
Here is a short account of what happens between the wax model and the box, and who does each part of it in our Cape Town studio.
- Casting. A wax model goes into a flask, the flask is fired, and molten metal is spun into the space the wax leaves behind. Our caster has done this for twenty two years and can hear from the sound of the machine whether a pour has gone right, which no amount of equipment has ever replaced.
- Filing and shaping. The raw casting comes out rough, with a sprue where the metal ran in. This is the slowest part and the one that decides whether a piece feels good on the hand. A ring can take forty minutes of filing to lose a ridge you would never see but would feel every day you wore it.
- Setting. Stones go in last because everything before this can be redone and this cannot. Our setter works under a microscope and sets by hand, one claw at a time. A small pendant stone takes about fifteen minutes. A line bracelet takes the better part of two full working days.
- Polishing and checking. Every piece gets polished, cleaned in an ultrasonic bath, then checked under a loupe by someone who did not make it. One piece in twenty goes back. That second pair of eyes is why our return rate stays low.
Visitors are usually surprised by how quiet the studio is. There is no music and very little talking, because setting and filing both need the kind of attention that conversation breaks. The noise comes in bursts, from the casting machine and from the polishing motors, and in between it is mostly the sound of a file on metal. People who are new to it find the quiet strange for about a week and then stop noticing.
If you are ever in town, phone ahead and come and look. We put a bench day on the calendar every second month, where anyone can come in, watch a piece go from casting to finished, and ask whatever they like. It costs nothing and it changes how people think about what they are buying, which is good for us. The pieces on our website are not made in a factory somewhere far away by people nobody can name. They are made forty minutes from most of Cape Town by nine people who will happily tell you their names.
Thanks for reading this far. We will have more guides for you soon, so check back.
