3-D Printing Adds New Dimension to Manufacturing
The jewelry business is set in its ways. Jewelers today still use a technique that is thousands of years old to create new pieces of jewelry. Called lost-wax casting, this process starts with a pencil-and-paper sketch of a ring, necklace, or other piece. The sketch eventually becomes the model for a mold. The entire process takes more than 40 hours.
Jewelers use the mold, or prototype, to mass-produce hundreds or thousands of units, much as automakers churn out cars. This process has worked for, well, thousands of years.
Moving past the cookie cutter
But the way jewelers create new models is changing. Thanks to an emerging method of manufacturing known as three-dimensional printing, companies like Stuller Inc. …
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