Dan's Wedding ring

My brother Dan got married to the beautiful Kati on the weekend in Port Stephens on the NSW coast. It was an amazing weekend in a gorgeous location.
I was honoured to make Dan's wedding ring.

Dan is a cinematography based in Sydney. It was important to Dan that the ring be light weight, strong and comfortable. It has been years since Dan wore a ring due to the nature of his work. Cinematographers work with their hands all day long and in Dan's own words "I need the hardest metal in the world". That would be titanium.
The titanium ring shank is slightly tapered for comfort and the above image shows the materials I began with to make the ring, a titanium shank and the ingot of silver to be in-layed at a later stage...

Here is my bench. Firstly I gave it a bit of a tidy up. I like to do this before beginning a new process or project.

The required tools....

Before picking up any tools I masked out the ring with tape to protect the brushed surface as much as possible.

Here I am filing the inside of the ring to a comfort curved interior finish. I really love a curved interior profile as it increases the comfort and wearability of rings exponentially which was a number one requirement for my brother.

After filing out the bulk of the material with course and fine files, I then went on to polish the inside of the ring with small buffers.


This step is complete.

The next step is to get the silver inlay into the titanium. I re-mask the ring leaving a gap in the masking exactly where I want my inlay to be positioned. For this ring I chose to slightly off centre the inlayed strip.
Using a micro grinding wheel, I ground out a slot 1.5mm wide into the ring. This process took a while as accuracy in this process is absolutely crucial.

The piece of silver must be a tight and exact fit into the groove with some over lap to strike with the hammers. Once the piece of silver has been wedged ito the groove it is a matter of hammering and trimming the ingot until it has been planished into place. I have no images of the hammering because I was so absorbed with the making process that I didn't think to take any photos.

Finito!
CONGRATULATIONS DAN AND KATI Mwah!

Jewellery photography

This set up looks even more professional than my dodgy attempts of photographing my own work. This image makes me feel better as there are other out there with make shift set up like me.

Part A of making a cameo bangle

Here is an image of my bench. I am looking at a print off of profile shots of myself as a reference for doing the line drawing of the cameo to scale.



After drawing the cameo image to scale I then glued it onto a slab of carving wax.
I then scribed through the paper onto the wax. This image is of the wax after I have pulled off the paper line drawing.



Carving the wax...



This is after about 8- 10 hours of carving. I have polished the wax using terpentine and a rag and alot of patience.



I then cut and filed the wax and set it into a bought finding.

Part B of Making a Cameo Bangle

I had the wax and frame sent to the casters where I got it silicone moulded and cast in silver.



Bending and forming the shank from half round stock gauge silver



After filing and sanding the prongs to an elegant shape, I then gave an offering and a prayer to the soldering gods and hoped for the best. It worked. right on. The image here is the metal being cleaned in the pickle (a hot acid solution to clean the flux off).



Here is is clean and polished! I decided to polished the shank and leave the cameo matt white, which I achieved by heating and pickling the top of the piece repeatedly to bring up the fine silver to the surface.



After much faffing about with different finishes and techniques and having to re-polish and fine silver after every damned failed attempt at getting it looking the way I wanted...

I ended up painting the background black with enamel paint.

Done. Photographed. And now in a box under my bed. x