Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm Posts: 21602 Location: San Francisco
I just got this email from John Dyer and I thought y'all might find it interesting and informative. I sure did.
John Dyer wrote:
Custom Gems from John Dyer Our cutting is a very labor intensive process so we can't just cut hundreds of gems quickly. However we can preform them and that allows us to expand what we can offer you!
We are doing something new! While we still will always tailor the cut to what we feel is the ideal use of the individual gem rough, we are now preforming large numbers of our rough and keeping the preforms in stock to compare with client requests. This allows us to much more easily match what we have with what the client wants and also allows us to offer as a possibility to our clients gems that we haven't had the time to finish cutting yet.
This means that when we have a preformed gem that looks close to what you or your client wants we can find the gem and start cutting it much more efficiently than was possible before. (Due to how busy we are and other factors it can still be up to 2 months from order to the finished gem arriving at your doorstep depending on our schedule at the moment, but it is faster than before! We have here a sampling of some preforms we have in stock waiting to be cut.
Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2016 7:58 pm Posts: 1424 Location: San Marcos, CA
Yes it is! May they be branching off in new adventures it appears. Maybe just new to me due to this post, not a big follower other than the occasional walk by in Tucson. It may just say how much the Luxury Designer base has shrunk over the last several years. JMO...
Seems a bit strange, as the amount of preforming done in those pictures would take no more than 15 minutes. I have heard that John has cutters in I think Brazil, so maybe he is preforming them to orientate and then sending the preforms to Brazil for finial cutting and polishing. When ever you see a cutter with many hundreds of stones, you can kind of doubt they are doing all the cutting. With precise cutting, you can do 2 maybe 3 stones per day, so when you see a site with a thousand stones, either the person rarely sells anything and you are looking at years of work, or they have others cutting, or they are working 12 hours per day 7 days per week.
Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2016 7:58 pm Posts: 1424 Location: San Marcos, CA
I didn't dive that deep into the site, only read the link page and noticed they were not actually being cut by JD. That does answer the preforming part and disproved my speculations in part.
If no one has the patience for that, then it helps to know that I/we don't cut to an order just because we have an order, it has to fit what the gem wants to be. (So no wasting rough and no sticking clients with gems they ordered but don't love.)
Having a ton of preforms on hand helps me to relatively quickly know if I have what the client wants or not.
I participate in the cutting of every gem, in some cases I cut the entire gem, but in many cases I do parts while my personally trained assistants complete the rest. Much of this is done in Brazil (usually with me present) but ideas of low cost can be discarded as I have a cutter in the US who makes decent money and at the moment they are costing me about the same as cutting in Brazil (partly due to speed of work, but we pay fairly well in Brazil). PrecisionGem mentioned 2-3 gems per day per cutter, I only wish!!! Doing two would be an extremely fast day for me in the style/quality we do unless it was a very simple cut.
We average about 1.2-1.4 days labor per gem. Some take far longer. Fantasy cutting is a real time drain, but oh is it cool!
Me having assistants may be shocking to some, but the Munsteiners have done it for years (5-7 people helping I was told) and the end result for me is that quality has increased over the years as there is more specialization and patience dedicated to the task. Although quantity hasn't in the last 5 or so...possibly partly due to quality increases? Still of course I couldn't complete as many gems as we carry in stock entirely on my own in the quality we do them.
We do also carry some gems that are cheaper and not done "in house" by people who I have trained myself, they are still well done, but called "JD Select Outsourced" gems clearly listed as the cut name and hidden in our catalog by default unless you choose to show them.
_________________ Gems are purchased because they are pretty, so they should be as pretty as possible!
https://www.johndyergems.com Artisitic and designer cut gems
We average about 1.2-1.4 days labor per gem. Some take far longer. Fantasy cutting is a real time drain, but oh is it cool!
Wow, that makes cutting expensive. I don't cut Fantasy so not sure how much extra time that takes. But I usually plan on 45 minutes to 1 hour each for crown and pavilion. That is for high qualities in traditional varieties of semi-precious stones in the 2 to 10 carat range. Doesn't much matter whether I am cutting classic step or brilliant cut bottoms and brilliant crowns, or meet point style stones. I consider all of them precision cut. This based on workmanship in symmetry, proportion, polish and meet points. The one area I am super strict is I don't accept windows. I do do windows when cutting what I call Homage stones in traditional antique styles. The are designed to be that way.
When cutting very expensive Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Paraiba, etc. rough, I do take extra time to ensure maximum yield. I also will sacrifice symmetry on the pavilion at times for this. Still it would be a very rare stone that took a full day.
I spend a great deal of time teaching my students to cut a brilliant top by eye on fancy shapes in no more than 1 1/2 half hour. The current crop has been working on this for the last couple of Months. About 1/2 are there.
Since you don't cut for hire, I guess the cutting costs get put in the stone price. But I have to figure that the costs are in the hundreds/ct for a two carat stone here in the US.
10 hours X $25/hr , minimum. I also don't cut other peoples rough so I am not sure. But when I had cutting factories overseas, I was always trying to keep costs below $1.00/ct.
I have a friend in Sri Lanka, he and his father and his father before have been selling cut sapphires. The son is now starting to cut and we spend a lot of time comparing methods etc. He told me that the experienced cutters in Sri Lanka are spending about ½ hour to cut the stone after it has been preformed. About 15 minutes is spent preforming. Their preforms almost look like our cut stones with out the polish.
I know another guy who has a cutting house in China. His process is more like a small assembly line, with each person only doing one task (preform, dop, cut crown, cut pavilion). He told me each person works on at least 30 stones per day.
So for this year I have cut 253 stones. So that's just about 6 stones per week. As a one person operation, a lot time is spent photographing, updating the website, invoicing, shipping, corresponding with customers, rough procurement, so it's not all cutting time.
I have set up big production shops in a few Countries. We almost always have a system where each step is done by one person.
There are rough graders and sorters,
Then performers. These are the highest paid most skilled. The money is made or lost at this step.
The night crew sets up the machines for the size shape being cut the next day. They also dop the stones.
The night crew then also calibrates in the girdles.
When the cutters come in the stones for the day are already on each cutters table. Mostly cutting crown first. They have two zone laps. The first one cuts and polishes the mains. The second the stars, the third the breaks. The stones are then passed to the doper crew who turn them over. During lunch break the machine crew resets the machines for the pavilions. The cutters come back from lunch and finish the pavilions.
Each cutter does hundreds of stones in an day. But because it is a team we are looking for between 30 to 50 stones per person per day. Each stone then only has less than 15 minutes of labor time in total.
For larger more expensive stones we still use dedicated performers and sorters. Each cutter cuts and polishes complete stones. We count on between 10 and 15 stones per cutter per day.
In reality all, of the cutters could produce what Americans like to call precision cutting. The issue is really only about yield and time. The market accepts one step down from that as good cut stones. It is a money issue not a technology or capability issue.
Believe it or not, historically the TV shopping channels are the most demanding customers there are regarding issues of cut. I think Gregg can also confirm this.
What's strange is the places with the most expensive labor rates, spend the most time cutting, cheap labor spends little time cutting. Does seem backward doesn't it.
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