a. Recent History of the Jewellery Industry in Turkey prior to RP Applications
Over the last 10 years, one of the most conservative and old-fashioned industry in Turkey has taken giantic steps on applications of RP technology and changed the path of its development trend from bottom to the very top level.
In Turkey, the traditional Jewellery manufacturing based on apprenticeship had been done by skilled jewellery makers, mainly with simple tools and through basic processes, but mostly handmade. It was not easy to develop skills in jewellery making, and accordingly, the added value of this traditional production level could never be comparable to what could have been achieved through high technology mass production.
In 1998, Turkish Jewellery Producers had only the capacity of producing low priced “stamped” golds. Although for this type of production skilled labour was not required at all, the whole process of production did not bring much added value to the industry as well as to the Turkish economy. The main product of jewellery sector which is highly priced and high value added is the “casted” golds with the insertion of precious or semi-precious stones which necessitates highly skilled labour to make the master models for such a production.
b. Introduction of RP Techniques into the Turkish Jewellery Market
1998 is the milestone in the Turkish Jewellery History since in 1998 the very first.RP machine, Solidscape MMII and first CAD system, namely JewelCAD entered into Turkish Jewellery Market. Until then, in the local Jewellery Industry, computers could only be found in the accounting departments. However, with the access of this innovative technology into the market with the initiation of 4C Engineering, some jewellery makers were impressed so much by the wax printing ability of MMII, they started to spend hours working on their PCs to learn JewelCAD.
Although, the operating JewelCAD needs a thorough knowledge of wax patterns for casting models, it is a lot easier and faster to manupilate this software instead of working for long hours or days in some models on a real wax.
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