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Transcript:
- [Andrea] Hi everybody. Look at that mountain. Isn't that beautiful. This is Andrea and I'm here, today, at Park City Jewelers with Ken Whipple, owner.
- Hi. and we have a little partner in crime there. It's our own moose.
- [Ken] Come on in. I'll show you some cool stuff. We've got a lot of you guys asking questions about elk ivory and elk ivory jewelry, so we thought we'd answer a few of them today. Here's our elk ivory case. A lot of pieces we've made already. And there's a lot of pieces that aren't in the case here that are on our website, so make sure and check it out and you'll see the new things.
- [Andrea] Here's some of the questions we found. How many ivory teeth does an elk have?
- Two. They're the top eye teeth, up on top here.
- [Andrea] When do elk get their ivory teeth?
- They're born with them. They're just really, really small when they're born. They grow over their lifetime.
- [Andrea] Which elk tooth, on an elk, is made of ivory?
- The top ones up on top here.
- [Andrea] Why do elk have ivory teeth?
- Millions of years ago elk actually had tusks that came out of their mouth. There's still a deer around, called the vampire deer, in Korea. You can go online and we might be able to post one here that shows them. And they actually have tusks out the side. Kind of almost like walruses do.
- [Andrea] Do bull elk have ivory teeth?
- Bulls and cows.
- [Andrea] How do you polish and clean elk ivory teeth?
- Once we've made it into a piece of jewelry for you, all you need to do is just take a soft rag or take a real mild dish washing liquid and just scrub it and just polish off by hand. If you've got a silver polishing cloth, you can use that, as well, to keep the nice shine on top of it. When we get your tooth, it's pretty worn and a little bit rough from the elk chewing all the grass and whatnot, so we just put a light polish on top of the tooth.
- [Andrea] What's the value of elk ivory teeth? How much do they cost?
- I've got a lot of them. We sell them for around 10 to 100 dollars each, depending on the quality. All elk teeth are not created equal. There's a huge difference in size.
- [Andrea] Can you give us some elk ivory jewelry ideas?
- We come up with some crazy stuff already, but we're always thinking of new ones. You can see in the case here, we've made belt buckles, pendants, rings are probably the most popular. We've got a money clip. We've got a knife. We've actually taken some bullets and we replaced the little bullet part with the elk's tooth. These are cuff links on the side here. We can do real traditional look. We can do more blocky look. We've made some really fun earrings. We also just do the earring with just the elk on them. We've done ladie's bracelets, men's bracelets. We've done watch bands, on the side of watches. Here's a fun men's bracelet I made the other day.
- [Andrea] That is stunning.
- It's heavy. You gotta feel our jewelry. Our jewelry's not like the cheap, lightweight crap you buy in the mall. This piece, when you hold it, it feels like it weighs a pound. It's a nice piece. We don't scrimp. The reason we don't scrimp is because we give a lifetime warranty on all of our work. I don't wanna fix it, so I make it to last. The gold on the elk head, it's solid 14 karat all the way through. This top piece here weighs over a quarter of an ounce and it's heavy. No matter how much you wear this, beat it, bang it up it still can be polished to look just like this. My grandpa told me, when I was a kid, if you're gonna do it, do it right the first time, you don't have to redo it and you don't have to apologize. So that's our theory and that's how we make it. There's a fun bullet ring in here, I don't know if you saw that. It's a bullet. You can tell us what caliber you want us to use and we can make it. We've got a real cool band in the center with a diamond in it, with elk heads on the side.
- [Andrea] That's a new piece, right?
- That's a brand new piece. We can make anything you want, even a fun desk monument up here in the center. If you look there's a fun elk head with the antlers.
- [Andrea] That is so cool. That's on the website too.
- We can literally make anything you want. Bring it on. Let's make something fun for you. We made a ring one time for a gentleman. He was a bow hunter and so on the side of his rings we actually put some 14 karat gold arrows down underneath the elk, embedded into the ring. That was a really, really cool one. We can engrave on the inside of it. You can engrave what year you got it. We can engrave your elk rating on there.We can engrave whether it was a six point. We can even customize the sides of the ring with the elk antlers, to make it to where it has as many points as your elk had. We can do the whole thing. It's really, really fun.
- [Andrea] Sounds like this would be a great gift too.
- Yeah. Yeah, way good gift. Something that'll last forever. One of the guys came in and he went hunting with his grandpa and his son and they brought their elk ivorys in and we made them matching rings. It was pretty cool.
- [Andrea] That's fantastic. Okay, how do we get ahold of you?
- parkcityjewelers.com. You can email us. My email is ken@parkcityjewlers.com. You can call us on the phone. Any way you want. You can get a hold of us on Instagram. You can get ahold of us on Etsy. We've got some pieces on there. But you'll love the stuff. Do it quick. I looked the other day and gold has gone crazy lately. Going up, up, up, up. It's gone up over $100 in the last couple weeks. Silver's on the rise. I haven't adjusted my prices yet. I don't want to adjust them. I hate doing that. It's a pain in the butt, so they'll stay the same for a while, but as it keeps going up we're gonna raise them. So you really wanna get in fast. Send us your old tooth, we give you $100 off. If you've got extra teeth you don't need, you can send those in and we can give you credit towards those. Same with the old gold. If you've got a little gold or silver we can trade that in as well. Give us a holler. Let's make something fun.
- [Andrea] Thanks.