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A Complete Guide to Bur Shapes for Jewelers
Choosing the right bur shape can dramatically improve precision, efficiency, and overall results at the bench. Whether you’re cutting seats, refining prongs, shaping metal, or enlarging holes, understanding each bur’s purpose helps you work smarter.
Important: Always use proper lubrication with all burs.
Bud Bur
Bud burs have a softly curved taper ending in a point, making them suitable for tapering and enlarging holes, repositioning holes, and a range of tasks related to setting stones.
Cone Bur
Cone burs help enlarge and smooth holes and reposition holes in flush settings before refining the seat. Cross-cut cone burs feature teeth instead of fluted cutting surfaces for more aggressive cutting.
Cup Bur
Cup burs (with flutes inside the cup) are commonly used for rounding wire ends, shaping prong tips, and creating domed rivet heads. Lubrication is especially important when using cup burs. Twin-cut styles offer two parallel cutting edges for symmetrical cuts.
Cylinder Bur
With straight sides, cylinder burs are ideal for removing significant amounts of material. Larger sizes are often used for shaping and grinding the interiors of ring shanks. Cross-cut styles feature teeth for faster stock removal.
Hart Bur
Available in 45°, 70°, and 90° profiles, hart burs are widely used for stone setting. They’re ideal for cutting seats in prongs, as well as channel and flush settings. They can also score lines or serve as an alternative to flywheels for bright cutting.
Inverted Cone Bur
Inverted cone burs are great for extending channel walls and defining edges—especially when you need crisp geometry and controlled edge shaping.
Knife-Edge Bur
Knife-edge burs taper into a sharp edge around the circumference and feature cutting flutes on both the top and bottom surfaces. They’re ideal for precision grinding in tight areas like prong seats, plus material removal on flat surfaces and scoring lines.
Krause Bur
Krause burs fit into extremely small spaces, making them versatile for enlarging hinge pin holes, adjusting drilled holes, cleaning excess solder joints, and refining openings in box clasps and other mechanisms.
Pavé Cut Bur
Pavé cut burs combine two steps into one: predrilling (like a twist drill) and shaping/enlarging (like a round bur). This saves time and increases precision. They offer impressive cutting performance, long service life, and can cut tougher metals like platinum, white gold, titanium, and steel.
Round Bur
One of the most versatile burs, the round bur can be used at almost any angle and reaches tight spaces easily. It’s great for carving recesses, engraving, texturing, drilling and enlarging holes, cutting for stone setting, and refining bezels and prongs.
Setting Bur
Setting burs are predominantly used for cutting seats in prongs, bezels, and tube settings. They’re often used for the initial shaping of a seat, which is later refined with a hart bur.
Wheel Bur
Wheel burs have flatter profile flutes on both the outside edge and top surface, making them great for opening channel walls or defining crisp inner edges with control.