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It's quiet here at the moment, so I thought I'd show you what I worked on this weekend. For once it's not an app or a bicycle

As you know I'm all about stealth wealth, so now that the time has come to get a set of wedding bands, I decided to go the DIY route. I've always liked the look and feel of wood, and after some googling I saw that it could be possible to make rings out of it. Headed to timber city, and spent about R200 on wood, sandpaper and glue, then proceeded to glue my fingers together over an evening, but here's the outcome:


Turns out I bought too much wood. I got 5 meters, but only used 1 meter making 3 mistakes and two great rings.


Step one is boiling, step two is rolling and glueing. That's actually the hard part, making sure you don't splinter the wood or glue your fingers together. I did both. Repeatedly. The next step involves sanding. Steps 4 through 258 are also sanding!


Here's the end result. I like it, my fiance likes it, and it's very tough. As much as I tried I couldn't break one of the mistakes.


The smaller ring was far harder to make, but the fiance loves it 

Yep, that's pretty much the process. They're impregnated with cyanoacrylic which should make them pretty hardy, time will tell I guess. I did initially look into making them from a single piece of wood, but the lack of a lathe and the reports of how they crack under pressure made me go for a bent wood design rather.

I wasn't sure what type of wood it was, timber city only has veneer edging, and only this and another very light coloured wood was available without being pre-glued. The light coloured wood wouldn't bend even when boiled for ages, so I went with this. The colour came out really nicely so I'm glad I did. I might try the light coloured wood again, though it'll probably mean a number of boil and bend cycles to get it to a small enough radius.

Was carpentry once a hobby of yours?

My father was a carpenter for many years, sadly he stopped when I was old enough to take an interest, and never passed on any of his skills. Now it's something I'm quite interested in, if only I had more time, and the space for equipment!

Ag dammit, there goes my week end. Please give a better description of the wood? is it like paperwood in a roll?

   Thanks

Very nice. I just hope that pic is of the ring is on your finger and not some other extremity.


 

As an option to making these rings you could consider finding a hole saw with an appropriate size of the ring that you want to make. Use an offcut of 16 mm MDF. Stick (wood glue is fine) 2 layers of newspaper around the MDF cut out. Then layer your edging over the paper and glue in place and in that way build up the height of the laminates they often call them veneers, the other is called edging especially the edging that you affix to edges of chipboard to hide the edge (this is normally just ironed on). If you have a Timber City woodwork shop they sell laminates - you have to wet them as when in the purchased state they are very brittle as they are normally less than 1 mm thick in some cases
This approach will save you lots of sand papering. To get the MDF out use the whole saw to drill out the centre - just remember that you will lose some of your internal laminate so maybe make it higher (thicker) than required to compensate for the internal loss
Have fun - you will find different ways of making these rings and your turnaround time will quicken as you find other shortcuts