People often assume that bringing us their own gold means we simply melt it and pour it into the new piece. Stones, in almost every case, genuinely do travel from the old setting into the new one. Gold is a different story, and we'd rather tell you honestly why than let you assume something we can't actually deliver.
Why we don't usually re-melt your gold directly
An old ring or chain is rarely just gold. Every repair or resize it's ever had involved solder, which is formulated to melt at a lower temperature than the gold around it, using metals like zinc, cadmium or tin. If we melted the whole piece down as it stands, that solder would melt in with everything else and leave us with metal of an unpredictable, altered composition, not something we could reliably cast into a new design. Older pieces are also often not one consistent alloy to begin with; a piece repaired over decades might be a mix of carats or colours we can't simply combine into something clean.
There's also a more practical problem: unrefined scrap tends to cast badly. Contaminants and oxidised metals create tiny voids in the finished piece, called porosity, which weakens the metal and makes it more prone to cracking later, particularly under the stress of setting stones. We're not willing to build something for you on metal we know has a real chance of failing that way.
What we do instead
What actually happens with most of the gold that comes to us is refining. We have your piece weighed and its carat tested, then it goes to a specialist refiner who separates the pure gold from solder, other alloying metals and contamination. What comes back is clean, verified gold, re-alloyed to the carat and colour your new design needs. The value of your original pieces weight in fine gold, minus refining costs is then credited against the cost of the new one, rather than paid out separately. Sometimes the refining process can be costly, in these cases we can scrap the metal and make new, taking off the value of the scrap from the new price.
We know this isn't quite the same as "your literal gold, unchanged, in your new ring," and we'd rather say that plainly than let you find out later. What it does preserve is the thing most people actually care about: continuity of value, and the sense that something of the original piece has gone into the new one, even if the atoms have been through a refinery along the way. It's also simply how legitimate gold recycling works at proper scale, not a shortcut we've chosen instead of the "real" option.
There are cases, mostly simple, hand-fabricated designs like a plain forged band, where working your actual old metal directly is possible rather than refining it first, though it comes at additional cost. It's worth asking us about if literal continuity matters to you and your piece is a simple one as it isn't something we can offer for a design with claws, fine settings or intricate detail, where a clean, verified alloy matters more than it might seem.
For the fuller technical picture, including how gold is alloyed and why porosity happens, our reference site Commissioned has a longer explanation of why old gold usually can't be melted straight into a new piece.
Where sentiment doesn't have to give way to chemistry
If refining feels like it loses too much of the original, there are other ways to keep a physical thread between the old piece and the new one. A small, untouched section of the old band can sometimes be set into the new design as a visible or hidden detail in an inlay, a lining, a small tag alongside the main piece. We're also happy to return any leftover original metal to you as a keepsake, separate from the new commission entirely, if that matters to you. The one honest caveat is that we can't promise it upfront: we don't know whether there'll be any surplus, or how much, until the piece is actually finished, so we sort out these arrangements with you case by case as the work progresses. And your stones, assuming they're in good condition, will almost always be reset rather than replaced which, of everything discussed here, is the most literal way we can carry your original piece into the new one.
If you'd like to talk it through
The best way to find out what's realistic for your specific piece is to bring it in. At a bespoke consultation, we can look at the gold and stones properly and tell you, honestly, what we can and can't do with them.