Jewelry Manufacturing Robot: Bench to ABB Arms

Most rings and pendants still pass through human hands several times, at the bench, at the casting machine and at the polishing wheel. A jewelry manufacturing robot takes over some of those steps: dipping wax trees into ceramic slurry, holding a ring against a buff, or placing small stones. This post follows jewellery making from the goldsmith's bench and lost-wax casting to CAD and 3D printed patterns, then looks at the robot polishing cells now in jewellery plants, Pandora's new factory in Vietnam and the 2026 Jewellery Technology Forum. It ends with where ABB arms such as YuMi, the IRB 1200 and the IRB 6600 already fit, and where they could.

A Brazilian jeweller's bench with its tools, built by the jeweller himself in 2001. Photo: Mauro Cateb / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

From the goldsmith's bench to the casting flask

For centuries a jeweller's tools were a bench, a saw, files, a torch and a polishing wheel. Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter shows how that work scaled up. The Birmingham Directory of 1780 lists 26 jewellers, and by the start of the nineteenth century there were around a dozen jewellery firms employing about 400 people. The area is still Europe's largest cluster of jewellery businesses and makes about 40% of the UK's jewellery. One firm there, Smith and Pepper, made gold jewellery for more than 80 years with very few changes in working methods, and when its owners retired in 1981 they locked the door with the tools still on the benches.

The Smith and Pepper workshop, kept as it was left in 1981, at the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. Photo: Philip Halling / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Casting is the part of the trade closest to mass production, and it is very old. In lost-wax casting a wax model is covered in a refractory mould, the wax is melted out and molten metal fills the hollow. The oldest known lost-wax objects are gold pieces from the Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria, dated to about 4550 to 4450 BC. Jewellers cast small parts in a refined form of the same method. Wax models, either carved by hand or injected into a rubber mould, are fused onto a sprue base to form a tree, a steel flask goes over them and is filled with investment, and the finished tree of rings comes out of the flask after casting.

Wax rings made as master models for lost wax casting. Photo: Mauro Cateb / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Mechanisation in the twentieth century mostly sped up pattern making. Rubber moulds and wax injectors let one master model become hundreds of identical waxes, and later computer aided design and 3D printers took over many of the master models as well. At the Jewellery Technology Forum in Vicenza in September 2026, speakers described polymer 3D printing as a technology long used to make casting patterns. Finishing stayed manual for much longer. Someone still has to cut the sprue off each casting, grind and pre-polish the surface and set the stones, usually one piece at a time.

Joseph Marshak's jewellery factory on Khreshchatyk Street in Kyiv, around 1910 to 1913. Photo: unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robot polishing cells and a new Pandora plant

Polishing is where robots have gone furthest. In 2022 Christian Tse Design & Manufacturing in Monrovia, California, launched a VDK-2300 polishing system built with Flexible Robotic Environment. It has two articulated arms in an enclosed cell: one holds the ring, earring or pendant, the other holds the polishing tool chosen for that design, with tool changers and special fixtures for different metals. The company said the system eases the problem of hiring and keeping skilled craftsmen. ABB handles the same physics with force control: its FC Pressure software keeps a constant pressure between tool and surface while a robot grinds, polishes or buffs, as our post on robot grinding and deburring explains.

Hand polishing tools and silver pendants in a jeweller's workshop. Photo: Mauro Cateb / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Production capacity is growing as well. On 1 October 2026 Pandora opened a $150 million factory near Ho Chi Minh City, its first production site outside Thailand. It can make up to 60 million pieces a year, will employ about 7,000 people and adds about 50% to Pandora's capacity, using only recycled silver and gold and renewable electricity. Pandora has not said how much of the plant is automated. A few weeks earlier, at the 21st Jewellery Technology Forum, Legor Group described printing metal jewellery parts on HP binder jetting machines, including one run of 27,000 steel charms with a reported 97.4% yield through sintering.

Workbenches and finished necklaces at the Yvel jewellery factory in Motza near Jerusalem, 2025. Photo: Zeev Stein / PikiWiki Israel via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

We found no ABB robot in a named jewellery plant, but ABB arms already do the heavier end of the same process. At Franklin Bronze and Alloy in Pennsylvania, an ABB IRB 6600 installed by Shell-O-Matic in July 2005 dips wax pattern trees into slurry and sand to build ceramic investment casting shells. Before that, six workers made about 100 moulds a day by hand. For small parts, the two-armed YuMi IRB 14000 was designed for small part assembly next to people, and the compact IRB 1200 tends machines and handles small parts, the kind of work involved in loading rings into a polishing cell or a laser marker.

An ABB IRB 6600 dipping wax pattern trees into slurry to build investment casting shells at Franklin Bronze and Alloy, Pennsylvania. Photo: ABB

Where jewellery robots go next

The next robots in jewellery plants will probably move and check parts more than they shape them. A small arm can take castings off a tree after cutting, sort them by style, load them into tumblers or polishing cells, and present each piece to a camera for inspection. Stone setting is harder. Machine makers already sell wax setting robots that press stones into the wax pattern before casting, but setting stones into finished metal by robot is still rare. For a jewellery maker, an ABB YuMi or single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 is a possibility for this kind of small part handling, but nobody has announced such a cell.

Programming a single-arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Variety is the biggest obstacle. Watch factories run long batches of identical parts, as our post on watchmaking robots shows. A jewellery line often makes many styles in small batches, and each style needs its own fixture and program. Gold and platinum are expensive, so a robot that drops or over-polishes a piece costs real money. Programs for such cells are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio, which helps when designs change often. Labour pulls the other way: skilled polishers are hard to hire and keep, the reason Christian Tse Design & Manufacturing gave for its robot cell.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, launched in 2025, a compact arm for machine tending and small parts. Photo: ABB

For people at home the change will show up mostly in price and in how custom pieces are made. Printed wax and resin patterns already let a jeweller turn a customer's sketch into a cast ring quickly, and direct metal printing may skip the casting step for some designs. Robots are most likely to take the dusty, repetitive work of polishing and handling in large factories like Pandora's, while hand setting, engraving and repairs stay at the bench. Small workshops that make one-off pieces have little to gain from a robot cell that needs fixtures and programs for every design, so their benches and wheels are likely to stay.

An earring made of 3D printed metal, from the ASTRA+ project in Estonia, 2025. Photo: Art Ra Jalakas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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