Fabrication

While casting presents a range of palladium-specific factors, fabrication poses fewer challenges. Experts report that there is much for jewelers to like about working with palladium. “The metal offers significant design freedom,” says Ballard. “Complex shapes are easy to create because you can pull tighter curves and push palladium to greater angles than nickel white gold alloys and most yellow gold alloys. Palladium tolerates being worked to a high degree without going brittle. At the end of a work session, you can have a more sophisticated design than is possible with many other metals.”

Also, palladium draws down well and can be pulled through a die easily. After work hardening, annealing the metal will quickly return its malleability. “Even if it’s not annealed, palladium can be squeezed down 90 percent without breaking,” says Ballard.

For repair and fabrication, palladium can be soldered or laser welded. (Laser welding operations provide many of the same benefits they do to platinum alloys, including the ability to perform repairs around gemstones and fill porosity.) PM West has developed a solder of plumb 950 purity specifically formulated to work with palladium. “Because palladium is so new to fine jewelry manufacturing, it does not have a highly developed supply chain infrastructure of solders, settings, clasps, wire, and so on,” he says. “Our new solder gives a manufacturer an alternative to grabbing an 1,100°C or 1,200°C platinum repair solder off the shelf to tackle a problem with a palladium product. It matches the palladium content, but has additives that pull the melting temperature down while maintaining color and strength.”

Ballard adds that, as the popularity of palladium increases, a broader selection of solders, settings, and other support materials will become available from suppliers in the jewelry industry.

Machining

While palladium bears resemblance to other jewelry metals in castability and workability, in the machining area, palladium is in a league of its own. Bruce Pucciarello, one of the owners of Novell Design Studio (www.novelldesignstudio.com) in Roselle, New Jersey, advises jewelry manufacturers to develop an understanding of the processing behavior of palladium compared to that of platinum or white gold. “Palladium behaves differently in the milling process than the more familiar metals,” he says. “In my experience, palladium vibrates more during machining, and for this reason we cut at slower speeds (typically from about 2,500 rpm down to 1,800 rpm) to avoid galling. We favor kerosene-based oils that evaporate quickly, thus reducing the opportunities for chips to mix with the oil and build up heat.”
When machining palladium, Pucciarello opts for diamond tooling. “We found that tungsten-carbide tools provided only limited success,” he says. “Because we do so much custom work in small quantities, we prefer diamond tooling for palladium, because it can be flexibly used across all our products, lasts longer, and allows us to do the cleanest work.”

Pucciarello says that his experiments machining palladium were an eye-opener. “Whenever we set up for a new metal, our overall knowledge base expands,” he says. “Now that I’ve refined my knowledge of speeds, oils, and cutting tools for palladium, I’ve found that I have a new arena of milling possibilities to explore. I think there are many solutions to design problems waiting to be discovered by innovative artisans. Many of these discoveries will be developed into marketable product lines thanks to palladium’s growing popularity. Also, giving designers an untapped medium to experiment with will unleash a lot of creativity, which in turn may spark more consumer interest in unique palladium products.”

Your Palladium Strategy

For those who are adopting a wait-and-see strategy, it may not be wise to wait too long to get aboard the palladium bandwagon. Pucciarello believes that the acceptance of palladium will occur much faster than the acceptance of platinum. “Platinum was a groundbreaking metal—it had to earn acceptance, and that process was slow,” he says. “The fine jewelry market is now more accustomed to respond quickly to a new metal. Retailer and consumer acceptance of palladium is likely to happen more quickly than it did for platinum.”

Teague is blunter. “If you are not considering palladium right now, that may be foolish,” he says. “Many manufacturers are already well on their way to developing palladium jewelry capabilities. Those who don’t start down the learning curve soon may be left behind. “The race is on.”