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.
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/
