I enjoy making rings with clients who bring their own gold into the workshop. Often, it is rings that have been passed down from older generations. There is no gold that I could provide that would be more meaningful than something that has been in your family. I used family heirloom jewelry to create my wife’s wedding and engagement rings.

The fastest way to incorporate family gold into new wedding rings is to use it for inlay. Small amounts of gold can be melted onto the surface of another metal with a higher melting temperature. This works best when adding yellow gold to platinum, palladium, or white gold. (We can go the other way, but it is a little more time consuming.) Inlay can be on the outside or inside of your wedding rings.

When working with a solid band, it is easy to create a ring with a liner. The family ring can be used easily on either the inside or the outside of the ring.

If you want to melt down the gold completely and create new bands, it is a little more complicated. I will need to see and approve the jewelry you bring in to my workshop before I commit to helping you make rings out of it. Around 5% of the gold that clients bring will not work to create wedding rings. Read more about melting your own gold into wedding rings here.

In the event that you have gold that is unsuitable to melt down - either because it is the wrong color or of low quality - we can refine the gold in my shop. This is an expensive and time consuming process that should only be used when you have an important sentimental attachment to the gold you are bringing.

Sometimes, customers want to melt down their own gold to save money. A more cost efficient use of low quality gold - especially when it is low quality and not sentimental - is to use the value of the gold as credit to pay for fresh gold that is usable. While this is definitely not as cool as dissolving your gold in acid, it is by far the least expensive.

Any clients who want to use family gold in their wedding rings should do so - it is something that I absolutely love to do. Feel free to contact me to discuss which of the options above might be the best solution for you.