A solitaire band looks like the simplest thing we make. It passes through eleven sets of hands and takes about eleven working days, and the simplicity is exactly why — there is nowhere for an error to hide.

Days one to three: drawing and wax

The design is drawn to scale, then carved in wax at the finished size. The wax is the last point at which proportion can be changed cheaply, so it is checked on the hand it is made for whenever the customer is in the city.

Days four to five: casting

The wax is invested in plaster, burned out, and molten gold is drawn into the cavity under vacuum. Cooling rate matters more than anything: cool too fast and the metal becomes brittle at exactly the points that will later be bent around a stone.

Days six to nine: filing, setting, and filing again

The cast piece is filed and pre-polished, then goes to the setter. After setting, it is filed and polished a second time — the setting process inevitably marks the metal, and a shop that skips this step is a shop whose rings look tired within a year.

• Pre-polish before setting, so no compound is trapped under the stone.
• Seats cut individually for that specific stone, not to a standard measurement.
• Final polish in three grades, finest last.

Days ten and eleven: hallmark and inspection

The piece goes to a BIS assaying centre, comes back marked, and is inspected under 10× magnification against the original drawing. Roughly one piece in twenty goes back to the bench at this stage. That rejection rate is not a failure of the process — it is the process.

“The machine can cut a seat in four seconds. It cannot tell you the stone is a hair out of round. That is still a person with a loupe.”

Anil Deshpande, workshop foreman