Legor and Tritone highlight AM capabilities at Jewellery Technology Forum 2026

The Jewellery Technology Forum reached its 21st edition on September 7 at T.Gold’s Smart Hub in Hall 4.1 of the Vicenza Expo Centre, running alongside the September edition of Vicenzaoro. The 21st edition built its programme around additive manufacturing for jewellery and luxury goods, covering both the polymer 3D printing long used to make casting patterns and, increasingly, the direct production of metal jewellery parts. Seven speakers took the stage across the day: Legor Group and Tritone Technologies detailing their own metal additive manufacturing operations, Politecnico di Milano researchers mapping where the technology sits within the wider creative industry, a designer’s take on AI and 3D printing, and market briefings from Intesa Sanpaolo and ESGCapital on the economic and sustainability pressures facing Italian jewellery manufacturers.

Legor’s binder jetting

Mattia Lago and Mattia Trentin, who run operations and technical development at Legor Group’s 3D Metal Hub, gave the most granular account of industrial metal additive manufacturing at the forum. Legor, an Italian alloys, plating and powders supplier to the jewellery industry for nearly 50 years, launched 3D Metal Hub as a metal 3D printing production service in 2022. Their session, the third instalment of an ongoing series, drew on more than 2,000 part geometries the hub has processed with binder jetting over three years of production for jewellery and fashion accessory clients. Legor prints on HP metal binder jetting systems in 316L stainless steel, the PANACEA and 17-4PH steel grades, and 925 silver, with gold, platinum and titanium in development. Parts go through printing, curing at around 150 degrees Celsius to form a fragile “green” state, then debinding and sintering.

Lago and Trentin walked through ten production case studies grouped by part geometry, each tracking yield from the initial batch through printing, sintering and finishing. A 316L steel charm run of 27,000 parts yielded 26,157 pieces through sintering, a reported 97.4% yield, before finishing losses brought the delivered total to 19,500. A 925 silver charm batch of 1,100 parts delivered 1,050 pieces, a 95.5% yield, in around four days. Harder geometries, including a curved “baguette” piece with an aspect ratio of roughly 8 to 1 and a heeled piece with an overhang aspect ratio near 10 to 1, needed counterdeformation simulation, using software including Desktop Metal’s LiveSinter, Hexagon’s Simufact and SFTC’s DEFORM, to compensate for sintering shrinkage. The heeled piece hit its ±0.1 millimetre dimensional target only on a second attempt, using a finer 70-micron layer thickness, and still returned a 92.5% yield. A logo-engraved ring and a chain hook piece returned yields between 88% and 93%, while a belt loop with deep engraving came in lower at 85.5%.

The session also covered where binder jetting struggles: clearing trapped powder out of fine engraved features remains a bottleneck, with engraved lines needing to be at least 0.2 millimetres wide and 0.35 millimetres deep to depowder reliably. Legor addressed this with IOJET, a projection-assisted depowdering tool developed with Austria’s Joanneum Research and Italy’s SMACT Competence Center under the EU-funded IRISS project, which Lago and Trentin said cut depowdering failure rates from 10-15% down to a negligible level, even for inexperienced operators. They positioned binder jetting’s commercial niche between batches too large to prototype economically on laser powder bed fusion and too small to justify tooling for metal injection moulding.

MoldJet’s slurry route

Tritone Technologies’ Matti Ben-Moshe, the Israeli company’s materials R&D manager, presented the MoldJet process Tritone has developed as an alternative route to metal and ceramic parts, backed by Stratasys as an investor. MoldJet jets a sacrificial mould layer to form cavities in the shape of the part, pastes a water-based metal or ceramic slurry into those cavities, dries and hardens the layer, and checks each layer with real-time AI optical inspection before building the next one. Once the build finishes, the mould material melts away for hands-free demolding with no support structures needed, and the green part goes through thermal debinding and sintering.

Ben-Moshe’s data showed sintered densities reaching 98% for copper and 98.5% for alumina ceramic, rising to 99.5% after hot isostatic pressing, with dimensional repeatability of ±0.5%, or a minimum of 0.05 millimeters. Throughput examples ranged widely by part: a stainless steel ring produced 250 parts in 24 hours, a titanium and steel fashion chain 156 parts in 12 hours, and a batch of earrings reached 410 parts in 90 minutes. Tritone’s materials list spans stainless and tool steels, Inconel 718, titanium, pure copper and alumina today, with gold, platinum and silver named as materials in development. Several of the jewelry images in Ben-Moshe’s deck carried a Legor Group credit line, a detail pointing to overlap between the two companies’ work in the same materials space even as they pursue different printing processes.

Research and design

Marco Luigi Giuseppe Grasso and Bianca Maria Colosimo of Politecnico di Milano’s IC Labs framed the two production talks against the wider additive manufacturing market. They put the global 3D printed jewellery market at roughly $0.84 billion in 2023, growing at +19.9% a year to reach about $3.0 billion by 2030, with the Asia-Pacific region accounting for 38% of that market. Additive manufacturing remains a small slice of the $14 trillion global manufacturing market overall, at 0.14%, but Grasso and Colosimo argued jewellery sits among the sectors, alongside aerospace, medical and motorsport, where the technology’s design freedom and small-batch economics fit naturally. Their presentation also traced a growing body of research on in-situ process monitoring, citing Scopus data showing publications on the topic rising sharply since 2018, aimed at catching defects such as porosity, cracking and surface flaws before they reach a finished piece, illustrated with an example of a platinum ring with a defective surface from irregular melting.

Mario Scarpa of Humanum Est Benefit Corporation took a different angle in a talk titled “Breaking out of sameness,” a follow-up to his 2025 JTF appearance. Scarpa framed 3D scanning, parametric CAD, casting simulation and resin or wax 3D printing as tools that extend a designer’s control over form rather than replace craftsmanship, built around a workflow of scanning, modeling, printing, testing and small-series production. He cited Eurostat data showing AI adoption among EU enterprises rising from 8.1% in 2023 to 20% in 2025, though manufacturing lags the broader economy at 17.3%, and Autodesk survey data in which 98% of design leaders reported using at least one AI tool but only 35% considered themselves close to their AI goals, a gap he used to argue that adopting a tool and using it to change a design process are two different achievements. The deck’s closing slide read: “The tools may be the same. You won’t.”

Market context

The forum’s opening session, from Intesa Sanpaolo economists Daniela Corsini and Sara Giusti, set out the precious metals and jewelry market conditions the additive manufacturing sessions operate within. Corsini’s precious metals outlook, delivered against the backdrop of the Israel-Iran conflict’s effect on regional supply chains, forecasts gold reaching $4,445 an ounce by the end of 2026 and $4,800 by 2030, alongside similar upward paths for silver, platinum and palladium. Giusti’s data on the Italian gold jewelry industry showed global gold jewelry demand at -18% in volume in 2025 and -21% in the first half of 2026 against record prices, with Italian turnover at -5.0% and production at -13.8% in 2025, and exports at -21% to €10.8 billion, a 45% share of the EU total. Stefania Tessari of ESGCapital closed the day with a session on substantiating sustainability claims ahead of the EU’s anti-greenwashing directive, which becomes applicable across member states on September 27, 2026, citing Legor’s own work across alloys, chemistry, 3D printing and sourcing as an example of the paper trail regulators will expect jewelry brands to produce.