Anchorage Daily News

WASILLA -- Don't know a marquis cut from a princess cut diamond or a bead set from a bezel You haven't spent enough time with Randall Martin.

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Iditarod race winners receive championship rings crafted by Randall "Randy" Martin at Gold Rush Jewelers in Wasilla.

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The 54-year-old jewelry maker and owner of Alaskan Gold Rush Jewelers in downtown Wasilla can reel off types of metals he's worked with such as palladium and platinum like he's reading a grocery list and give a class on how best to pick up a sand-grain-sized diamond without dropping it.

A pointed stick of beeswax does the trick.

His two-story store near the corner of Main Street and the Parks Highway is a local landmark and one of the few places in Mat-Su that makes and sells custom jewelry. Martin is perhaps best known for fashioning the championship rings for winners of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race. But he and his staff of six have done it all, from making simple necklaces to a ring crafted in part from a mold of a puppy's teeth. (It was a customer's request.)

His building houses both a display area and his workshop. The display section looks like any other, with strategically lit cases filled with sparkling rings, pins and necklaces.

The workshop, however, looks like a cross between a shop class and medieval alchemist's store. It's fitted with a hydrogen torch and kilns that can heat metals to 4,800 degrees, and it is filled with enough miniature drills, files, picks and other one-of-a-kind detailing tools to make a dentist green with envy.

Martin recently sat down at his shop to talk about the ins and outs of mounting diamonds, using high temperature hydrogen torches (hint: wear eye protection) and being a buyer of used teeth.

Q. How did you get into jewelry

A. Um, I started making teeth when I was 19 years old.

Q. What Teeth

A. Yeah, 18 actually. ... I worked in a dental lab (in Arizona), and ... the reason I got a job at the dental lab, well, my parents told me I needed to do something. ... He hired me to do crown and bridge and plaster. I got the grunt work, then I started waxing and casting and finishing.

Q. And that got you into making jewelry how

A. I was making stuff in the dental lab after work. I would carve stuff up and cast things, make rings and bracelets. ... The first piece of jewelry I made was made from a silver fork. A silver eating fork. Basically I took the tines and twisted them up ... and then took the thing and spun it around.

Q. And what did you make

A. A bracelet.

Q. Out of a fork

A. Yeah, out of a fork.

Q. What do you like about making jewelry

A. Ah, it's just ... It's making something from nothing, pretty much. All the metal that comes in (here) comes in through the front door. It's just a very satisfying thing to do from start to finish.

Q. What's the range of things you make

A. Rings, pendants, earrings, everything. Anything that can be worn. We even do some of the pierced stuff, you know belly-button rings -- that's as far as we go.

Q. What's the weirdest request you've had

A. The weirdest thing I ever had was some lady brought in some puppy teeth that her puppy had lost and I made a mold of the puppy teeth and I put one on each side of a one carat diamond in gold.

Q. Do you have a favorite material, or favorite thing you like to make

A. Yellow gold. I like to use yellow gold.

Q. Why

A. Yellow gold. Gold is good. Platinum is good too. If I had my druthers, I would use yellow gold because of its workability, its malleability, the beautiful yellow luster that comes off it when it finishes. White gold is OK, but it's a little harder. Platinum is a very dense metal. It's really soft in working. As far as application, it needs to be used right.

Q. You get your gold from a variety of sources like gold miners, even from people who walk in with gold crowns from the teeth of recently deceased loved ones. Does it ever seem weird taking teeth

A. Well, yeah it was when it first happened. It was kind of like you didn't want to touch them. You'd put them in an envelope and way back when I used to smelt them with a torch and had to heat them up to get the glue and tooth out of them. Coming from making teeth though it wasn't too bad. It never still is a joyous occasion though.

Q. What's the most expensive piece you've ever made

A. It was a truck bracelet (a bracelet with a truck design) that had like three carats of diamonds. It was a semi truck full of details with yellow diamonds, rubies and white diamonds, and white and yellow gold. It had a truck for a centerpiece of the border piece. I think it was probably somewhere about $40,000. I also made him a truck ring and truck necklace.

Q. Can you tell from people who come into the shop what they're going to go for like: "Oh that's a gold nugget person, or a silver filigree person"

A. You can usually tell if someone is going to get an engagement ring. It's usually a couple and they're -- you can tell they got something going.

You can't really ever tell what anybody is going to do down there. Someone can come in dressed like they just came out of the woods and you wouldn't think they had a dollar to spend and they spend $10,000, and that's happened.

Or they pull a handful of gold out and they want to sell it to you.

That's the great thing about having the shop, all the gold miners come in.

Q. Any big mistakes people make with jewelry, how they handle it or what they think they want

A. They make mistakes buying things that are going to be too high of maintenance, like too many prongs.

In our Alaskan lifestyle, we're rough on things so I try to build things that have (can stand) a lot of wear. I discourage prongs, but I still set prongs.

Bead setting like these stones (he points to a gold watchband he wears that has inset rubies and diamonds) are set down in the metal.

I've been wearing this thing for a long time. It will wear for a long, long time before those little deals wear out.

Channel setting, bead setting, bezel setting, those are good ways to go. Prong setting -- not a really good way to go.

Find S.J. Komarnitsky at adn.com/contact/skomarnitsky or 352-6714.

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