One of the highlights of our visit to Panyu China
was to the Hutang Gem and Jewelry Company Colored Stone
Cutting and Jewelry Manufacturing Factory.
The Hutang company was started in 1992
cutting colored gemstones.
They since moved into jewelry manufacturing also.
So they've moved up the value chain,
and they not only cut the colored stones,
but they also set them into finished jewelry.
They have offices in Los Angeles, in Hong Kong,
and recently opened an e-commerce site.
They're buying directly from the mine,
so they cover a large portion of the mine to market value chain.
Sawing removes further slight imperfections
from the chrome diopside.
In the pre-forming stage, they're
setting the basic shape and outline of the stone.
To begin with, we saw rough Russian chrome diopside
being sorted for size and other quality factors
and then trimmed with a pair of pliers
to remove any highly included areas.
Now this machine, they're actually cutting the girdle,
polishing the girdle, and they're
setting the exact shape, outline, and size of the stone.
The faceting process was amazingly fast.
The dop had a chuck in it to where
as the stone could be adjusted, angles changed.
And then the dop rested on a platform
that had a dial with flat surfaces
so the angle could be changed.
But the speed of these workers was just amazing
as they were faceting the stones.
It was so quick, it almost defied
the use of automated cutting.
This worker now is using a dop setup
to where it's an L-type shape, and he
can polish the table of the stone flat onto the lap.
This young lady is matching the color
of these citrines, which must be precise for the jewelry they
manufacture.
An under appreciated job is the counting of gemstones,
but it's highly important for an operation like this
with a large number of stones to be accurate
for each parcel or profits are lost or customers are upset.
Here, they're polishing the jewelry
that the colored stones will be set into for this vertically
integrated company.
One of the most important aspects, they feel,
of their jewelry manufacturing is quality control.
Here, these young ladies are looking at this ring
and finding areas with any imperfections,
like porosity or the polish isn't good enough.
Well, they'll mark it with a different color code
and then send it back out to the factory floor, where
the jewelers will rework these areas to bring it up
to the proper quality standards.
Now here you can see that the jeweler is reworking a ring,
and he's working on it with a file
and basically sanding paper, constantly
looking to see if the porosity or file
marks have been removed.
They'll also use sanding paper on a flex shaft
and take it down a little bit finer.
Then they will send it to the final polish
to be checked again afterwards by the quality control.