Filing & Sanding

When a jewellery piece arrives back from being cast the first thing that needs to be done is to check over the surface to make sure that there are no casting flaws caused by minute air bubbles created when the plaster mould was being made. Most surface flaws are very small and can be easily removed by filing but sometimes with deeper holes then the casting has to be laser welded which melts the surrounding surfaces and removes the hole.

As the casting was created from a 3d printed model then it is more than likely to have a very fine linear texture on the surface due to the model being built using 50 micron thick layers which will have been slightly smoothed of by the shot blasting cleaning process, this textured surface needs to be filed to an even surface using a series of shaped 2 cut needle files followed by either 2 different grades of wet and dry paper (medium and fine) or using rubberised shaped Evelex burrs which come in a selection of coarse to fine grades.

After going through the sanding process the item is now ready to be polished.