The founder's bench — Khurram Yaseen

I started Jewellery Tools because every working jeweller I knew was frustrated by the same thing: catalogues full of tools no-one had actually held, sold by people who didn't know what they were selling. After fifteen years at my own bench, I thought I could do better. This page is the longer version of why.

The bench came first

My first proper bench tool was a 4oz chasing hammer I bought from a retiring silversmith in Hockley. I was nineteen, halfway through evening classes at the Jewellery Quarter School, and that hammer had a handle worn smooth by twenty years of one person's grip. It cost me £6. It changed how I worked.

You don't think about your tools until you have a good one. Then you can't stop thinking about your tools. That hammer taught me that a bench tool is the most personal piece of kit a maker owns — and that the difference between a good one and a bad one isn't usually price. It's whether someone who used the tool was involved in making it, choosing it, or selling it.

The qualification matters less than the bench-time

I went on to take a Post Graduate Diploma in jewellery and silversmithing (Level 7) — important for the trade, but the deeper education came from running a small commission workshop for nine years. Repairing rings, setting cabochons, raising hollowware, dealing with customers who wanted impossible things done in three days. You learn fast at that pace. You learn faster when a tool fails on you mid-job and you have to source a replacement before the end of the week.

Most of what I know about jewellery tools, I learned by buying the wrong ones first. Hammers with handles that worked themselves loose. Pliers whose jaws didn't actually close parallel. Mandrels with surface marks that telegraphed onto every piece they touched. A ring sizer with the wrong tolerance that meant every "size N" I made was actually a size N½.

That's expensive education. And it's the education that working jewellers don't have time to take twice.

Why Jewellery Tools exists

The UK tool supply market is dominated by two kinds of seller. The big ones list everything, inspect nothing, and warehouse off-site. The small ones know their kit but can't compete on stock breadth. There's a gap in the middle where someone holds the catalogue to the same standard their own bench would — and that's what we're trying to be.

Every product on jewellerytools.co.uk is inspected at our Small Heath workshop before it goes live. If we wouldn't put it on our own bench, it doesn't go on the storefront. That sounds like marketing copy. It's actually the inspection workflow documented on our methodology page, and we reject about one shipment in four when we run it. The supplier list we work with has been rebuilt twice on the back of those rejections.

The Bench Journal exists for the same reason. There's no shortage of e-commerce blogs writing thin SEO-bait articles about jewellery tools. What's harder to find is honest writing from someone who's actually used the tool yesterday. Every article on the Journal is either written by me or reviewed by me before it goes live, and most are based on something that came across our bench in the previous month.

We show up where the trade does

Part of holding the catalogue to a bench standard is seeing the tools in the metal before anyone else does. We exhibit at the international trade shows where the jewellery and dental trades gather their makers and manufacturers — Inhorgenta in Munich and T-Gold at VICENZAORO in Vicenza for jewellery and silversmithing, and the International Dental Show (IDS) in Cologne for our dental-laboratory range. It is where we meet the people who actually forge, machine and temper the kit, test what is new against what we already trust, and decide what earns a place on the storefront.

What this site won't be

We're not trying to be the biggest UK jewellery-tool supplier. We're trying to be the one a working bench user can trust without checking the reviews. That means:

• We won't list cheap counterfeit imports just because the margin is fat. If a product is fake, we don't carry it.
• We won't sell anything we haven't physically inspected at the Birmingham bench. Drop-shipping disqualifies a supplier from our roster.
• We won't write product descriptions that exaggerate. If a hammer is a beginner's tool, the description says beginner. If a plier set has rough edges out of the box, the description says so.
• We won't auto-reply to customer emails. Every email gets a working jeweller's reply — usually within four hours during business days.

If you've ever spent a Saturday at the bench cursing a tool you'd just bought because you couldn't get it to do the job, this site is for you.

The bench you can email

If you've got a question about a tool, your workflow, or what to buy next, just email me. info@toolsmithltd.co.uk reaches our shared inbox and I read every message that says it's a bench question. I'll answer with a real recommendation, sometimes a photograph of how I use the tool at my own bench, and never with a copy-paste autoresponder.

Welcome to Jewellery Tools. I hope your bench is a happier place because of what we send you.

Meet the rest of the bench team →