Four kinds of work
Restoration
Cleaning, re-tipping worn cutlery, taking dents out of vessels and replacing hinges that have given up. Honest ranges, and a straight answer when a piece is not worth the work.
Most silver that comes to me is not broken. It is tarnished, or slightly bent, or worn in the places it was always going to wear, and a few hours at the bench puts thirty more years on it. That is the best value work I do and it is the part of the job I would keep if I had to give up the rest.
I work on silver and silver plate, sterling, Britannia and older standards. I do not work on gold, platinum, or anything with stones that need resetting. If a piece needs a specialist I will say so at the quoting stage rather than after.
Send photographs first. Good light, a plain background, and one shot of the marks if there are any, which matter for the reasons in the note on hallmarks. I will come back with a range and an honest view of whether it is worth doing.
What I take in
Four kinds of work, priced by what they take
Every figure is a range because every piece is different. A quote from photographs is free and it is confirmed once the piece is in front of me, never after the work is done.
Cleaning and re-polishing
Tarnish removed, the original surface identified and matched, and the piece brought back without flattening its detail or its marks. This is the job that most often gets ruined at home with a chemical dip, which is covered in looking after silver at home.
£35 to £140Per piece, by size
Re-tipping cutlery
Spoons and forks wear thin at the tip after decades of use, and eventually go through. New metal is let in, shaped to the original profile and finished to match, so the outline is right rather than merely repaired.
£28 to £48Per piece
Removing dents from vessels
A dent is stretched metal, not displaced metal, so it has to be worked back over a stake rather than pushed out. Bowls, beakers, jugs and trays. The same raising and planishing skills described in sinking and raising a spoon bowl, applied in reverse.
£70 to £340By size and severity
Replacing hinges
Failed hinges on boxes, caddies and lidded pots. The old knuckles are cut out, new ones made and fitted so the lid closes on its own weight and stops where it should. The fiddliest work on this page and the most satisfying when it lands.
£130 to £390By hinge length
What cannot be restored
Silver plate that has worn through to the base metal cannot be repaired by polishing, because there is nothing left to polish. It can be replated, which is a different trade and one I will point you toward, but any remaining original surface is lost in the process and on an old piece that is a real loss.
A hallmark that has been polished flat cannot be put back. Neither can engraving that has been buffed away, or a crest worn through. Metal that has been removed is gone, and anyone offering to restore a worn mark is offering to forge one.
Silver that has been badly overheated, usually by a previous repair or a house fire, can be permanently coarse-grained. It will look faintly pitted at every polish and it will crack if worked hard. Sometimes it can be made presentable. It cannot be made right.
And severe corrosion, the deep pitting that comes from salt or damp left against silver for years, goes into the metal rather than sitting on it. Taking it out means taking the surface down below the pits, which on thin antique work means going through. I will always tell you when that is the situation, and I will usually recommend leaving it alone.
Work I have made
Anything from the four collections comes back for free refinishing for as long as I am at the bench. That covers re-darkening any oxidised surface, renewing a satin finish, and truing a band that has gone slightly oval, because none of those add or remove metal. You pay the postage to me and I pay for the return.
Resizing is different, because it means letting metal in or cutting it out. On a ring I made it is free within the first year and £45 to £75 after that, the same as any other plain band. That is the whole aftercare policy and it is repeated word for word in the terms.