Ring Explosion

A few months ago I purchase a darling double butterfly Le Vian ring. Much to my disappointment, one of the side diamonds fell out after only wearing it for four days! Not to fear, back to the store and the ring was completely covered under the Le Vian warranty and off it went to have the stone replaced. I had hoped that this process would only take a week or so, but it was well over a month until the ring arrived back to be picked up. So here I promptly went back over to the jewelers on Wednesday to retrieve it. It was lovely and good as new.

That was until Thursday evening when the diamond above the one that had been replaced fell out!! Talk about being truly perturbed. I'd only worn the darn thing for about 10 days and here it was broken once again and I was sure it was going to end up being gone again for another month! In lieu of going through this over and over I decided to return it and just be done with it - I really didn't want to spend all my time back and forth having it continually repaired.

With that in mind I returned to the jewelers and found that I was past my 30 return period. Needless to say I wasn't the happiest of campers. The manager definitely understood my frustration and proceeded to speak with one of the on site jewelers. It appeared from a quick look under the microscope that the prongs holding the stone in place were too short and that was what was causing all the issues. With a promise of overnight repairs done in house, I left the shop satisfied.

That brings us up to Saturday evening when all the fun really began. I arrived back to pick up the ring and the jeweler who was doing the repairs met me at the counter. He had that "look" that something wasn't quite right. Boy was that an understatement. He said that when he applied heat to the ring to re-tip the prong the ring blew up!

Turns out that the original casting had air bubbles in the metal and when the heat had been applied the air expanded and the rest is history. I didn't see the end result but I bet it was a spectacular show. As a result of the poor casting a brand new ring is winging its way here.

On another note - the cameo ring that picked up in Italy suffered a terrible accident. About mid-summer the dog's leash got caught under the cameo and nearly ripped it off. It had been able to be put back to visually normal but the ring wasn't nearly as strong as it had been. Picking up computer case on Saturday finally dealt the ring a death blow, the band broke in half. Since I was already at the jeweler's picking up - I was able to find out if it was repairable. Much to my joy it is and won't take forever nor cost a fortune either!!