Craig

After we got the polishing to a point where it was almost done, was time to think about the final steps.

The first of the final steps, was to do a mirror polish with something called jeweler’s rouge. It’s a messy substance that gets red everywhere around you. I took a Dremel and the polishing bit (which I’d never understood it’s use…) and applied the rouge all over. It took the “brushed chrome” look that I’d gotten to, and made it super shiny. That was really unexpected, even though Russ had told me what was going to happen, and super exciting to see!

We had a bit of a set back at this stage though. Two problems with the final gem – first, it was still on a boat from Thailand, and second, it was the wrong size. Because of the first problem, we’d gone back to Mountain Gems and picked up a few 4mm garnets to use as a temporary stone. When we tried to set it, we realized that we’d change the size to 5mm, and we’d ordered a 4mm ruby. Back to Mountain Gems to exchange for some 5mm garnets to use, and back online to find a 5mm ruby. Luckily the smaller ruby wasn’t super expensive, but it’s still a bit of a fuck up.

Another moment that had Russ sweating a lot. He put the ring into this vice and very carefully used his power drill to widen the gem hole. We’d made it 4.7mm and needed it to be 5mm. 0.3mm’s >.> Centering this was a pain, and had him very worried, but he got it in the end!

We heated up this resin stick thing that looks a bit like ice cream. The point is to get the entire ring stuck in it, except for the setting, so that when we put a lot of pressure on the setting to hold the stone it, we don’t bend the ring. After it cooled down, it was stuck in the resin. I don’t even remember taking it out, but I remember being concerned that it was lost forever.

And here’s the incredible pressure! With the stone in the setting, he used a burnishing tool to “fold over” the edge of the setting to hold the stone in!

A little more polishing, and we were done! Here’s that first photo of it on Miranda’s finger…and here’s a link to my other blog in case you feel like reading a story about how the hell I gave it to her.

I’ve got one more post in this series, which is all the things we still have to do!

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. >.<

I missed most of this step, so here’s the Instructable version.

But first, a little bit of detail – I carved out the sides of the top where the gem would sit. The idea was to “break” the lines of metal so that the inward swoops would seem to stop. Also, this tapered cylinder is how we did the initial ring sizing – it has numbers on it corresponding to ring sizes.

The investment is another form of mold, but this kind can withstand the incredible temperatures required to cast silver. As you can see in the Instructable, Russ was downstairs every hour or so changing the temperature, as there is a very specific order to it.

I didn’t realize it until days later, but during this process my wax is burnt up. Which is why it’s called “lost wax” casting. This is funny, for reasons I’ll outline later when we get to the actual casting process.

I arrived at Russ’s house during step 13, and we discussed how to do steps 14 through 21 that night. Acetylene torches to come!

We had a good carving and needed to save it so we could endure screwing up later.

We used a very hard wax to attach the wax ring to a metal mold holder. The hard part here was that Russ’ basement is very very cold, and the wax would only become pliable once it was warm. So I spent 10 minutes folding it back and forth in front of a space heater before it started to move into a shape that worked for us.

Then we took two pieces of glass (seen on the desk, just behind the metal) and clamped them to the metal. We mixed a two-part silicon mold making material and poured it into the container we’d created. We let it sit. But since neither of us are particularly patient, maybe we didn’t let it sit enough.

Once it was set, we pulled it out of the metal and used an exacto to cut down the middle, being very careful not to cut into the wax ring which was still encased in the silicon.

We tried it out by melting some wax.

But unfortunately, again because of the cold in the basement, the wax would harden upon touching the edge of the mold and wouldn’t pour down into it. We tried heating the mold, to no luck. We tried more heat and a few different waxes before finally finding a particular wax that would work – one that was near water viscosity once melted. We let it sit (again, not for enough time) and pulled it out – near perfect! There was a slight flaw in the result, but Russ was convinced that it was because we were impatient, and not because the mold was poor.

Thinking about it now, this save point was also “good enough”. If we’d screwed up down the line, we would have been able to use this replica to save myself a ton of work, even if it did have a minor imperfection in it. There’s still lots of work to do before we got to the final stage, and lots of stages to fix mistakes!

The next step I missed most of, because it involved babysitting a kiln for 8 hours. I’m going to write about it, but since I wasn’t there, my knowledge of it comes from wikihow, and not from actual doings. 😛

This post encompasses many days and hours of carving. With our designs in mind, we set about getting something into the real world!

We started with a long green tub of a hard wax and cut it down to a reasonable size for a ring, but still a bit bigger. Since it’s easier to remove material than to add, everything had to start bigger than I imagined.

We knew that Miranda’s fingers were ring size 6.5, and Russ (hell, I’ll just name him…) has a piece of equipment that has ring measurements on it. We used calipers to measure size 6.5 on the ring sizer to find how how many millimeters that corresponded to. We then attached the cut piece of wax to a lathe and cut away the inside until it was that many millimeters around. We never touched the inside of the ring again!

Then the time consuming part. I (Russ went to work on other things while I did this) painstakingly cut away the sides of this green wax tube until it started to look like our design. I also used a hand drill to cut a 3mm hole in the middle for the gem, as we had decided to go with a smaller center gem at this point.

This is a photo at the end of the first day of carving. Very thick in the band, very chunky, but definitely the right direction.

End of the second day of carving. Getting thinner.

End of the third day of carving, even thinner still.

After the third day of carving, I looked at what I had created and really liked it, but was still thinking about the 3-gem design we’d thought about. The next day, we started from scratch again. This was a horrifying idea after having spent 3 days carving, but it was really interesting in that I managed to do the same amount of work in a single day!

I used a 5mm center hole this time. I don’t have any photos of this mid-step, but when I had enough room for the 5mm gem with 2 3mm gems on the edges, I didn’t like how the band looked. It was thick and chunky in order to support the 3mm gems, and I loved the curve and swoop of the original, with the band coming towards the center gem. I made a design decision and cut away the outer gems, leaving myself with only the 5mm center gem.

The first wax on the left, the second wax on the right.

The big carving was done with a Dremel to speed things up. But at a certain point you have to slow things down and start using ever smaller files to get the detail that you want.

As well, because I ended up cutting away to much (several times…) Russ showed me how to repair this. We lit a tea light and heated up a sculpting tool (which were identical to the kinds of tools we use to sculpt putty!). I applied this tool to a brick of wax to melt it, and then, similar to our puttying, applied the melted wax to the area that needed building up. I then had to re-file down the new area to match the existing structure. The problem with this process was that not only could you end up not filling the whole completely (so had to do it again), but also the new wax was a different colour from the existing wax. This caused a lot of problems for me not being able to see depth properly. I would think that the new black wax was deeper than the original green, that it was pitted or contoured in some way. I had no confidence, but Russ helped me figure out what was correct and what wasn’t.

Even with the second ring being much faster to make, it was still days of work to get it perfect. Russ wanted to make a “save point” so that we could screw up later and not have to re-do that work. The next step of the process will be familiar to anyone who has done any model casting!

I started out by looking at a bunch of rings. Miranda has a style that she liked and sent me a bunch of photos of (for me to purchase! hah!), sort of an antique look with lots of swirls. Unfortunately, there was no way that was going to be really successful with me making the ring, and I prefer clean lines with a more modern look anyway. I found this photo of a ring designed by a local Vancouverite, and took it to be my inspiration.

Then I did some drawings. I wanted to try to keep the “swoop” that I loved, but also to try to add a few swirls to try to blend the two styles a bit. I was ultimately unsuccessful, but in the page below, the bottom-left most drawing has lines across the band there were going to be like vines crossing the band.

I drew this on some note paper at work…you can see some work notes on the right. 😛

We visited a gem shop called Mountain Gems on Hastings in Burnaby to look at shiny stones. I knew I wanted a silver band with a primary colour red stone (because red is Miranda’s favourite colour, and because silver contrasts well with the red) (…and because Miranda had requested silver or white gold…). In this photo you can see we experimented with having multiple gems, an idea that I really liked. Not only did it bring our design further away from the source inspiration (because “inspiration” is good, but “copying” is not), but it also added some more flair to the ring. Again, in the end we had to leave it just with the one gem, for reasons we’ll get into later.

The gems in the above photo are a 5mm garnet with 3mm yellow and pink tourmalines. You can see that the prices here are…exceedingly reasonable. I had big concerns about this, as part of the reason why an engagement ring is more special than just any other ring is because you pay a lot for it. If I wasn’t paying $1,000+, it would be no good. My friend reasoned with me – how much do I get paid per hour? How much do I value my free time? We would be putting many hours into this project, more than enough hours to justify it. My sacrifice would be my time, and with this reasoning, I became happy with the cost.

After this preliminary design and thinking, we got right down to carving, which you’ll have to wait until next post to read about!