Manufacturing · Capabilities
Capabilities
Seven disciplines under one roof at Sitapura. Each described as it is actually carried out, not as a list of nouns.
01
CAD & CAM
Drawings become dimensioned models, and models become build-ready resin patterns.
A commission begins as a drawing and becomes a file. The CAD team models each piece in three dimensions — gallery rails, prong seats, bezel walls, hinge and clasp mechanics — so that metal thickness, seat depth and finger-size tolerance are settled before any material is committed. Every seat is cut to the measured girdle of the stone that will actually sit in it, not to a nominal carat weight.
Approved files are grown on a resin printer as a build-ready pattern, and that pattern is the master from which the wax tree and the production mould are taken. Working this way lets a buyer approve an accurate render and hold a physical resin trial before anything is cast, and it makes a repeat order dimensionally identical to the first. Hand drawing still starts most commissions; CAD is where a drawing is made buildable.
02
Wax & casting
Lost-wax casting in karat gold, alloyed in-house to the colour the piece requires.
Patterns are assembled onto a sprue to form a tree, invested in a plaster-based mould and burned out in a furnace so the wax leaves cleanly. Metal is then cast into the void, by centrifugal or vacuum casting depending on the alloy and on how thin the sections are. Karat golds are alloyed in-house to the colour the piece requires — yellow, white or rose — and grain is weighed against the tree so the pour fills without starving a thin gallery.
Once the tree has cooled it is quenched, the investment broken away, and each casting cut from the sprue and checked for porosity and short fill before it reaches a bench. A casting that fails goes back to the melt rather than being repaired. For production runs a vulcanised rubber mould is cut from an approved master, so a design can be reproduced without printing a new pattern each time.
03
Handcrafting
Pieces built at the bench from sheet and wire, where a casting will not hold the edge.
Not everything is cast. Much of what leaves the atelier is built at the bench from sheet and wire: rolled down to gauge, sawn, filed, formed over stakes and mandrels, and soldered with graded solders so each successive joint survives the next heat. Galleries, chenier hinges, box clasps, articulated links and open-back settings for coloured stones are made this way because hand-built metal holds a crisper edge than a casting of the same weight.
The bench craftsman fits the piece as it grows — testing spring, testing drape, checking how a necklace lies against the neck — and corrects it in metal rather than with a file at the end. Filigree and repoussé, where a design calls for them, are done by craftsmen who do only that work. This is the slowest part of the process and the part that decides whether a piece feels alive in the hand.
04
Stone setting
Prong, bezel, channel and pavé, and the Jaipur disciplines: kundan and jadau.
Setting is done by hand, by craftsmen who each specialise in one discipline. In prong setting the seats are cut with a bur to the girdle of the individual stone and the claws pushed and trimmed so they hold without covering the crown. Bezel setting raises a continuous wall of metal and burnishes it over the stone. Channel setting runs two parallel walls with cut seats so a line of calibrated stones sits level and unbroken. Pavé is drilled, seated, beaded with a graver and then bright-cut, so the beads themselves carry light.
Kundan is different work altogether: refined near-pure gold foil is worked cold against the stone and the seat and burnished until the metal grips — no claws, no adhesive. Jadau builds kundan-set stones into a lac-filled body, which is why a jadau piece is set and then finished, never the other way round.
05
Enamelling & meenakari
Vitreous enamel fired into engraved gold cells, one colour and one firing at a time.
Meenakari is done on gold, and it is done before the stones are set. The goldsmith engraves cells into the surface — chased walls that hold the colour and keep one shade off another. Powdered mineral enamels are ground with water, laid into each cell with a fine quill and fired in a small kiln, once for each colour and hardest-firing colours first, because a later firing must never exceed the temperature the earlier one survived. White and green go in early; red goes in last.
Between firings the surface is cleaned and any sunken cell refilled and fired again, often four or five times, until the enamel sits level with the engraved walls. The piece is then stoned back flat and polished. Because the whole assembly passes through the kiln repeatedly, enamelled work is planned from the first sketch rather than added at the end.
06
Polishing & finishing
Descending abrasive grades, then textures, plating and cleaning before inspection.
Finishing starts with the file and emery: the piece is worked through descending abrasive grades so that each stage removes the marks left by the one before it. It is then polished on bristle and mop wheels with cutting and colouring compounds, the operator working around a setting rather than across it, since a wheel will lift a prong as readily as it will brighten a shoulder.
Textures are applied where the design asks for them — matte and satin by fine abrasive or bead blast, florentine and hammered grounds by hand tool, mirror on the surfaces meant to carry light. White gold is rhodium plated after final cleaning. Every piece is ultrasonically and steam cleaned before inspection, and enamelled or foil-set work is kept out of any solution that would attack it. Finishing is where a piece is resolved or quietly ruined, so it is the last hand it passes through before quality control.
07
Quality control & hallmarking
Every piece inspected against its own specification before it leaves the building.
Every piece is inspected against its own specification before it leaves: weight and dimensions against the approved file, stone count and stone measurements against the setting sheet, prongs and bezels checked under magnification, clasps and hinges cycled, and the metal checked for solder porosity, file marks and plating coverage. A piece that fails goes back to the bench with a written note of what failed, and it is re-inspected by the person who rejected it rather than by the person who corrected it.
Gemstone identification and grading are the work of the laboratory that issues the report accompanying a stone, not ours. Hallmarking of gold jewellery in India is carried out at a BIS-recognised assaying and hallmarking centre, which applies the purity mark and the six-digit HUID to the piece.
Bring us a specification
If your piece needs a bench we have not described here, say so in the enquiry. It is a large floor and this is not all of it.
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