Author Topic: Wood you like to make a wedding ring?  (Read 4518 times)

Patrick

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Wood you like to make a wedding ring?
« on: January 25, 2016, 08:03:05 am »
I made a ring but never did the write up. It was easy though, so here it is:

1) Buy some wood. I used wood edging without glue from timber city. They sell it by the meter for about R20/m. You can easily make 5 rings out of a meter. The thinner the better. They only had two types without glue when I was there, one dark one light. The dark one worked better, the light one looked better.

Also buy sandpaper, all the different grits right up to 1200 which is pretty smooth. Apparently you can get up to 4000 and auto paint shops, I'd like to try that, but timber city went to 1200 which seemed to do the job.

2) Cut a 20cm strip, wider than you want the ring and then boil the living daylights out of it. Like for 30 minutes or even more. The more you boil, the easier it is to roll. When you think it's about ready, then boil it some more.

3) Take it out and start to roll it. Only as tight as you can without it folding and splintering. Then put an elastic band around it and re-boil it. Then re-roll it tighter. Repeat until it's tight enough.

4) Take the wood out and start applying superglue before it cools. Start on the very inside, glue a centimeter, then roll a centimeter until you've glued and rolled the whole piece. Swear a lot when you glue yourself to the wood, table, your clothes and hair. (If you can find gloves made out of plastic shopping bag material then you're in business, otherwise don't worry, superglue comes off in two days on skin). This is what it looks like now. Pretty isn't it :p

Just a note, superglue goes white if it's wet and doesn't look nice on dark wood, you might want to wait till it's dry before you glue the last layer or two.

5) Now get a sheet of very rough sandpaper. and sand to the thickness you want. I put the paper on the table and rub the sides of the ring until it's about as thin as I'd like.

6) Now you need to get a drill or a dremel out because you're too cheap to buy a proper lathe. I had a dremel so that's what I used. Take a large sanding type bit and grind out the inside till it's the right thickness for your finger. Then sand the inside from roughest sandpaper to smoothest.

7) Then I wrapped the dremel bit in tape until the ring was stuck tight on it. Turned the dremel on, and used the sandpaper in my hand to shape. This makes the sandpaper very hot, so you get burnt a lot. Swearing also helps here. Keep on dremeling using finer and finer sandpaper until it looks really pretty.

8) The last step is to apply superglue to the outside. You can either just use the bottle tip to spread the glue all around, or drip glue onto paper and very quickly spread the glue. Do the inside and the outside separately otherwise you won't have any way to hold the ring. For the inside it's easy, for the outside I again used the dremel bit I taped up to hold the ring.

9) Hang up the ring on a paperclip or piece of wire to dry.

10) Clean up all the mess you've made. Hint, nail polish remover can take glue off counter tops, your hands, the dog and your ears.

End result in dark wood:


And light wood:


Edit, here's the original thread: http://shareforum.co.za/off-topic/what-i-worked-on-this-weekend/
« Last Edit: January 25, 2016, 08:05:16 am by Patrick »

gcr

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Re: Wood you like to make a wedding ring?
« Reply #1 on: January 25, 2016, 11:33:59 am »
Patrick - 2 suggestions that may make the making of the ring easier but it is dependant on the centre bore of the ring
1) source a dowel rod which equated to the centre bore of the ring (or just a touch smaller and you can sand paper out the centre to the right bore to fit the finger); cut dowel rod to about 100 mm in length; wrap your laminates around the dowel rod, ensuring a tight fit on each wrap (hold extended end in a vice for rigidity); press each layer tight against each previous layer. Let the whole lot dry full - leave for about an hour, cut off excess dowel closed to ring and then bore out the centre with a drill just shy of the final internal bore required
2) If you have a drill then buy a hole saw slightly larger than the size of the external size of the ring size (outside radius) - hole saws come in a variety of sizes. Cut the ring blank with the hole saw, determine the exact centre point of the ring and drill this centre out to a size slightly smaller than the ultimate finger size.

From what I can see the wood you have used is probably a meranti given its colour and texture - if you adopt option 2 above you can then buy different planks of exotic woods like imbuia, kiaat, yellow wood, rosewood, oak or even teak as in most cases timber merchants will sell you a single plank of 25 mm thick unplained wood (but ask them to plain both sides for you before taking it - this will leave you with about a 22/23 mm thickness - if you want you can even take thicker planks of wood up to about 76 mm)

Have fun   
Not everything that counts, can be counted, and, not everything that can be counted counts - Albert Einstein

Moneypenny

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Re: Wood you like to make a wedding ring?
« Reply #2 on: August 15, 2016, 09:24:15 am »
I saw this of Facebook (House of Kallie) and thought you can start working on this anniversary gift for your wife.

Olive Wood, white gold and sterling silver

gcr

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Re: Wood you like to make a wedding ring?
« Reply #3 on: August 15, 2016, 12:47:07 pm »
Wild Olive is a very hard wood, but, it has absolutely brilliant graining
Not everything that counts, can be counted, and, not everything that can be counted counts - Albert Einstein