After I’d taken my ring out of the bucket of cold water and wondered at how marvelous it is, I set out to polish. A lot.
But first, I went home. That night I wondered about something Russ had said – “I think I’m more relieved than you are!” This statement swirled around in my head until I realized why — it hadn’t clicked with me that my wax had been destroyed when we made the investment!! If this process hadn’t worked, we would have needed to re-make a wax from that save point, and fix any issues with it, and then sit through the day of burning-off again. That would have been awful!
We started by cutting the base off of the ring so it was just a ring.
Then I started with some files and starting filing. There were a couple burrs, and a lot of black crap all over that needed to be removed.
Eventually it started to look like something that might be something I wanted to give to my sweetheart to tell her how much I love her, as opposed to a hunk of ring-shaped metal.
We checked the size again on the ring sizer and found that it was just a little bit to big. We cut (!!!) a few millimeters of the middle section away, pulled it together and used silver solder and a mini-torch to put it back together again. Then I filed that down again.
Russ did the soldering, as it was very fine work. As he did, I wanted to take a photo. I accidentally knocked something over on his desk, and got this photo of him having a mini-panic attack that I’m knocking things around while he’s playing with incredibly hot things. I love this photo. 😀
Seconds later he was back to normal. 🙂
After all the filing with the files, I moved to sandpaper. Lots of that. Looooots of sandpaper. I began to worry that it would never be done. >.<
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