Jewelers often need to convert mm to inches, wire gauge to diameter, and calculate the exact length of metal needed to create, say, a size 5 ring. Luckily, there are resources available that make this much easier, if (like me) it’s been more than 10 years since you were last required to know any mathematical formulas.

If you have an ipod or iphone, there are free apps that convert all kinds of units for you – I recommend downloading one. There are several, and all the ones I checked out seem to work fine and will do basic conversions such as mm to inches.

There is also a paid app for jewelry makers called iMakeJewelry which conveniently calculates metal lengths for ring blanks, as well as several other commonly used calculations for jewelers. Whether or not you choose to pay for an app that mostly includes information freely available elsewhere is up to you, but I like having it conveniently in one location and on my ipod. My favorite feature of the app is actually that it shows the current gold and silver spot prices, so I tend to check those once or twice a week if I’m getting low on metal to try to find a good time to buy (not that anytime is great these days, with metal prices through the roof…..)

No ipod? Artbeads.com now has a chart section on their website with info on wire gauges, calculating beads per strand based on the mm size of the beads, metric conversions, and more. Very useful, and completely free!