Turquoise backing story
Turquoise is backed because of many reasons. Turquoise is a very fragile stone. Most turquoise if it was not backed you could brake it in two with your fingers. The matrix that gives the stone its very beauty is usually where the stone will break or crack. Turquoise is its own formation and the matrix another and the two will usually part if stressed. You will notice that this matrix is actually for the most part a bunch of tiny pieces of turquoise that have formed with a coating around each. When you cut across these tiny pieces you get a spider web pattern. The more the web, the weaker that the stone can be. So the very thing that gives turquoise its highest value the matrix, is also what can break it apart. The Indians when they wore turquoise found that it would crack along these matrix partitions and they started to develop a cure for this problem. Some of the earliest forms of backing are very interesting and varied. The most common was to take a Ford Model T car battery casings and glue the turquoise to it. This evolved into using old phonograph records. These early records were very thick not like the records in the 1950’s and later. I am sure that there were many more things that were used over the years. I started cutting turquoise in 1973 and after a search found that the stuff on the back of turquoise was a liquid steel that was manufactured by the Devcon corp. Back when I started knowledge was hard to come buy and there were then and still are secrets that we each develop. This liquid steel is very strong and does not shrink or warp and is very stable. When you put this on the back of turquoise it gives a very fragile stone a foundation of strength that has proved over time to work very well. Backing turquoise is a turquoise industry standard. We in this turquoise business expect turquoise to be backed and would find it very unfavorable to not be backed. We stand behind our jewelry and expect the jewelry to last for generations. Home builders have something that they put down before building a house and this is called a foundation. I am sure that the earliest builders did not start building houses with foundations, but these first houses probably fell apart and these first builders found a cure for the walls that sagged and fell apart and this was what developed foundations. Turquoise is the same in this respect, To ignore what has been developed over the last 100 + years with backing, is ignorance and a direct insult to all the turquoise cutters and the Indians that have figured out a cure to make turquoise last and hold up under wear.
Copyright @ 2005 Jim Saunders
