Making my own wedding rings
geoff.greer.fm
geoff.greer.fm
Taking a completely direction, my wife and I made our own wedding rings out of stainless steel (a low-nickel alloy suitable for contact with skin -- 316L, I think), and we milled them on a lathe in my employer's machine shop after hours. Nearly 20 years later, and they have held up remarkably well.
If you're going to lathe a ring, make sure you do as much shaping and polishing before you detach it from the rest of the rod, and then create a mandrel that is the correct size to hold the ring (using friction) from the other direction. Hammer it onto the mandrel, do your final burr-removal and polishing, then pop it off the hammer.
Important side note: Don't do a test-fit before taking the burr off, or else you'll slice the skin on your finger all the way 'round in a very nice ring-shaped pattern and it will be the absolute dickens to try and get it off. Maybe don't ask me how I know...
I saw a video of someone making a ring out of polycrystalline diamond and…if that gets stuck for some reason, it's never coming off.
I can confirm that it works. I heartily recommend a face shield, and I wouldn't want to be the first guy the doctor had to break a ring off of.
The biggest difficulty that I know of with it is that the material is not very workable, and so if you need to get the ring resized, you may be out of luck.
Diamond is easy to remove: it'll melt with a blowtorch.
(You didn't say the finger had to be preserved intact...)
I wouldn’t have imagined that a fall off of the second step of a ladder could result in the destruction of a 40 year old wedding ring either, but here we are!
Plus a new "can't hurt myself with this if I tried" ring for any time spent outside.
Most commercial grades of Titanium can be cut with common tools. The tools will dull faster, but it's not impossible.
I suspect a lot of the stories about Ti rings being impossible to cut are coming from people who confuse Titanium with Tungsten. People get exotic metals mixed up all the time.
On the other hand, if you pulled it from the scrap bin you may have gotten some extreme aerospace grade of Titanium that really is difficult to cut.
Most of the rings referred to as Tungsten rings are actually Tungsten Carbide. Tungsten Carbide rings, by comparison, is VERY hard to cut. You basically need a diamond blade/saw/grinding wheel to cut through TC.
Now I’m curious: why use any nickel at all? Plenty of stainless steels (including, AIUI, basically all the tool steels) don’t use nickel, and many of them have excellent corrosion resistance. Is austentitic steel enough easier to machine to make it worthwhile?
Longer answer: It was 20 years ago, and we aren't exactly metallurgists. IIRC, at the time it was something to do with a variety of "surgical stainless" to focus on the best corrosion resistance combined with something that was somewhat machinable. At the time, I think we were comparing 304 (easier to machine, much worse corrosion resistance) vs. 316 (harder to machine, but much better corrosion resistance). I think looking at metals that we were able to source in partial lengths might have been a factor as well.
In hindsight, one might be able to find something with better properties in a more specialized alloy, but if I had to do it over again, I would 100% be willing to choose the 316L again. I have zero complaints with it, and the corrosion resistance it offers is superb. In 20 years, I've never polished my ring once, and it still has that mirror-finish quality (especially on the inside where it has never brushed concrete).
I rarely take the ring off (sometimes when juggling) -- I don't worry about it and leave it on even when using tools or scrambling up a rock ledge or carrying cinder blocks or whatever. Very occasionally it will get scratches (concrete is one of the few things that has left a mark from time to time), but they're never very severe scratches, and they buff out nice and naturally over time. I imagine that I would be much more concerned about a softer precious metal, and I'm glad I have a more durable ring instead.
Well, you could also just live with the scratches in your ring (if you had one made of eg silver) and declare them part of how it matures with the passage of time. Just like copper gets a patina, too.
(I'm glad you are happy with your ring! I'm just saying that if people decide to be happy, they'll find a justification to be happy with what they have. And if they decide to be unhappy, they'll find a reason, too.)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001093...
Conclusion: 304 and 316 are probably fine, as is 430 (which should be entirely unsurprising due to its near lack of nickel), but 303 would be a poor choice.
https://www.instructables.com/Home-Oven-Steel-TemperingColor...
Reading that page, it's interesting that the stainless steel rivets and fastener hardware are the only bits that didn't color. Quoting from the article:
> It is possible that the stainless steel might start to color if left in the oven for longer but my cursory research lead me to believe that stainless needs to get to about 800F to color. My oven certainly can't do that.
I've heard that welding stainless steel gets it too hot and removes something (the carbon?) essentially de-stainlessing it (?). I wonder how much of that would be happening at these temperatures.
Definitely not going to experiment with this on our 20-year old wedding rings, but it seems like this is very much worth keeping in mind for any potential future projects! Maybe if I ever help one of my kids make their rings for their wedding? :)
Thanks for the idea, and for the link!
I don't know if it's possible, but even if it is, it's not the carbon that makes the steel stainless. It's the additional chromium, nickel, or molybdenum.
Maybe when the steel melts during the welding process, those other metals get separated from the iron.
https://www.materialwelding.com/what-is-sensitization-in-aus...
I asked for a site that sells many rings of many different metals, with no luck. THIS metal, it turns out, is really difficult to cast. After many months with the idea shelved, one day my girlfriend found some chinese company that managed to do them. US$ 2k rings, and ugly as hell... but at least unique!
The girlfriend soon left me, but, well at least I still had the rings... until a few weeks ago when I noticed that I lost them too. C'est la vie :-)
When researching for this project, I did look up the densest metal possible: Osmium. Osmium has density of 22.59g/cm^3, which is 17% greater than gold's 19.28g/cm^3. (For comparison, lead is 11.34g/cm^3 and silver is 10.5g/cm^3.) Sadly Osmium melts at 5500ºF and can form toxic vapors, so making a ring out of it would be impractical.
So iridium would be the safest among the densest metals for contact with human skin.
Unfortunately, not only iridium is very expensive, but it is extremely difficult to shape, being much harder and much less ductile than platinum (and its melting point is also much higher).
Platinum-iridium alloys are much easier to shape than pure iridium, but still much more difficult than pure platinum. In the second half of the 19th century, when new standard meters and kilograms were made for distribution in all countries and to replace the original standards made of pure platinum, an alloy of platinum with 10% iridium was chosen, as the most resistant metal to mechanical and chemical degradation that was known at that time but for which it was still possible to process it into a given size and shape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Pcp944sRI&pp=ygUQcHVycGxlI...
No, I hadn't heard of purple gold either.
Wind up the machine, melt the metal in a small crucible, drop the pin and duck (lol). I was once sprayed by a small stream of molten brass at +/- 1700 degrees (poor mold with thin wall, later fixed and recast) and still have a scar 40 years later to prove it.
Just to nitpick, even with 3D printing these days, the process is still called lost wax casting. The printer prints a wax version of the model, and then the plaster is poured around it to make a mold and the wax model is melted out.
The only difference is that the wax model is made by a 3d printer rather than by hand.
https://helpcenter.phrozen3d.com/hc/en-us/articles/632528374...
I think the 3d printed part wouldn't burn away as cleanly as the wax that is designed for that purpose. Probably faster if you want more than one as well.
Many of them shrink when they solidify. For the size and tolerances needed for a ring you can probably ignore this detail. You can get what is called a low-shrink mold made for some alloys that helps mitigate this if you want to make your prototype to finished size (or you didn't know better before you takes to the jeweler).
Patternmakers deal with this using what are called shrink rules. They look like regular rules, but are e.g. 5% longer. If you're buying an old rule, make sure you don't get one by mistake.
Silver rings, worn regularly, won't need to be polished to keep the tarnish at bay; the contact from your skin will do quite well enough. Our wedding rings are also silver, and I've only polished mine when I haven't worn it for a while. Ours probably don't polish up to quite the same luster though. They're a regular alloy of silver for jewelry and not silver and gold.
Thanks for the info about the lack of tarnish. I'm glad I won't have to do much maintenance.
- take some container and put warm/hot water and a large helping of (table) salt into it
- put some scrunched up Al foil into the water
- submerge the objects to be untarnished in the water so that the silver touches the Al foil
- leave for a while in a well ventilated area (since it will smell of rotten eggs)
- rinse well
- done.
recipe from a kid's chemistry set I had a looooong while ago, used it successfully quite a few times on my parents' silver-plated cutlery they've had and used regularly since their wedding decades ago.
After 10 failures and different trials, this is my rough process: - Melt fine silver with a butane torch
- Pour it into a circle mold with a metal rod in the middle (makeshift ring mold). I tried sand casting with a wax mold but couldn’t keep the metal hot enough to fill the chamber.
- Hammer the ring on metal ring mandrel to shape and increase the size. This took probably 5,000 light hits with a metal hammer, periodically annealing.
- Use a dremel and grinding stone to further shape it
- Sand and polish by hand
Since I shaped it with a metal hammer, it has a really nice and natural hammer finish that I plan to keep.
I’m considering trying to electroplate it in palladium since the fine silver will tarnish and scratch over time, but it’ll be harder to fix inevitable mistakes.
I’m figuring it out as I go, but it doesn’t seem to be a major issue.
We bought some sand casting equipment and a thermometer and went over to his house. He had only ever used the foundry to melt aluminum, so we weren't sure it'd get hot enough to melt gold. We stuffed it with anthracite coal from a big bag he managed to get from a hardware store a while back, and sure enough, it got plenty hot enough. That 10$ hair drier really pulled its weight too, surviving hours upon hours of continuous use.
Before we bought any gold though, we did some test casts in aluminum. My wife, I, and a couple of friends melted down some cans, formed our sand molds with some cheap steel model rings, and cast some pretty bad rings. They weren't even rings, really, since they didn't even form full circles. But after a few more tries, we figured out better places to put air channels, how to pour the metal better, etc. and came out with some decent aluminum rings. We also cast some other trinkets like some dice and a little darth vader figurine.
More confident we'd be able to successfully cast gold rings, we ordered some 14k casting grain. When it arrived, we headed back to my friends house, cast some more aluminum trinkets to warm up, then my wife and I cast each others rings with only one small mishap; luckily gold can is easily re-melted. Breaking apart the sand molds to reveal the results was a tense moment, but they came out great.
We also opted for hammer finishes, and we're both very happy with the result. They have some small pockets on the surface, and we overestimated how much the rings would shrink, so mine's a little too big and I wear it on my middle finger, but we think of the defects as reminders we cast them ourselves. The end result wasn't the point anyway; if we wanted perfect rings we would have just bought some. The point was the experience of making them, and it sounds like the author had the same kind of experience, so I'm glad for him.
I'd recommend to anyone who is interested but does not have the skills to make a ring on your own. Great weekend trip from Seattle too.
If you are doing it because of the long history of giving diamonds, remember that the popularity of giving diamond engagement rings is younger than either US presidential candidate. :-)
I ended up getting my wife two engagement rings and one band, one was a diamond that was from her grandmother, the other was a moissanite stone in a low-snag setting which would be easier for her to wear under gloves at work.
If you buy a complete ring, you're usually getting quite ripped off. But if you buy a stone, complete with its certificate, it shall be worth what the market says it is worth. Competent jewelers will have no problem with you coming with a stone you bought or with an old family heirloom stone and put it on the ring you want: you'll pay his hours and the material for the ring but that's it. And the stone is worth its market price.
Diamonds above a certain size (whether they're natural or synthetic) are engraved now. You keep the certificate and you'll be able to resell it.
You can buy synthetic diamonds, they're cheaper than natural ones. And there's also a market for these.
Note that I'm not saying that the market ain't going down. What I'm saying is that you can definitely buy a stone at its market price and resell it at its market price. That's how the markets do work: be it stocks, gold or diamonds.
You can also have your design done in brass first for relatively cheap, to validate the design.
I made our wedding rings that way, as well as quite a bit of jewelry over the years for my spouse. (pendants, earrings, etc...)
You wouldn't guess it from their website at the moment though.
I did manage several failed castings.
Then I did a wrap of unidirectional carbon fiber around the ring in a designed-in groove. Wrapped some 1" ID silicone tubing around the ring, held in place by a cable tie, and stuck it in the oven at 300 for an hour. Carefully trimmed the carbon fiber edges with a razor blade for a hour or two.
Ring's still going good after 6 years :D
(I really need to pull together pictures of the process/design some day...)
> Hmm. That almost sounds like a relationship.
Best bit.-
Wishing them all success.-
The snag is that you need about 3X your desired weight in metal, which in gold is... probably more expensive than the vacuum casting setup! So maybe the above applies mainly to silver unless there's a good use for the rest of the gold.
I view things like a furnace or nice blowtorch as an investment into future projects that may otherwise not even be viable (in my mind) without the knowledge that I have said tool, so a small furnace for melting, while being more expensive, might expedite the process or increase quality, while also opening doors to future potential endeavors.
Using that experience I ended up starting a side business where I sell custom designed jewelry. My most popular design incorporates my customer's fingerprints. I build a pipeline that lets me go from a jpeg or other image file of the fingerprint to a fully 3d printable STL file (mostly using the blender python API). Because there are so many casting houses in LA they compete to keep the prices down. My completely custom rings that I have cast in small batches (compared to the large chains), are still very cost competitive with the competition.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2014/12/29/german_minister_finge...
Careful, your sarcasm is dripping!
> Why would I think that a physical 3D object with the pattern of my fingerprint that can be carried around and held up to anything might possibly be a security issue?
Have you looked at the image of the ring? How do you plan to scan that anywhere?
Are the grooves deeply etched? Or coated with some kind of protective layer? I imagine a few years of friction would rub away the finer details.
https://lulimjewelry.com/cdn/shop/products/fingerprint-close...
The grooves are cast quite deeply. I don’t anticipate any problems and I’ve been wearing mine for 7 years.
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Now, 8 years later, I'm really wishing I had designed my own ring. I would prefer to avoid the cliche metals (silver, gold, platinum), and I can't wear silver anyway (allergic). I would really like to find an interesting or unusual metal (scientifically or just in general) that isn't going to cause issues due to its hardness if my finger swells (titanium or tungsten are very difficult to cut off in those situations).
Does anyone have any material suggestions?
It’s used to plate white-gold to make it extra bright (unplated white gold tends to have a yellow tinge).
It would be super expensive though.
edit: on second look, seems it’s too brittle
However, it is not much softer than titanium or tungsten. Even so, it is quite frequently used for rings, piercings or medical implants with minimum health risks.
No metal suitable for contact with skin is as soft as silver and gold. For any ring made of another metal than these 2 you may need to go to a professional to cut it, if the ring cannot be taken out even with the help of some lubricant.
You're overlooking a huge benefit to a titanium ring: if you're trapped in an undersea mining rig that's flooding and the automatic door in front of you is closing, you can stop the door using your ring.
fwiw, people usually don't use a silver/gold alloy not because of cost, but because of hardness. But then, I like that for a wedding ring, it'll collect a few marks on the way - and that too is like a relationship.
This can take weeks or months, depending on the material and method.
Since there are nuts available from peculiar corrosion-resistant alloys and superalloys, the product can be quite unique.
Just fyi, silver certainly can corrode, it is not quite as non-reactive as platinum group and gold. So don't go dunking your nice ring into acids etc, and salt water can be bad too.
Got me some big husband points one recent anniversary with that.
Had I wanted a faceted hammered look from the start, I probably would have skipped the casting step entirely.
DIY aesthetic is nice, but sometimes there are good reasons why a specific tool exists.
Also, pure gold is commonly considered too soft for jewelry. It will scratch and ding easily. You should use 22k or lower, with the balance being copper and/or silver. You can easily buy a great alloy so I wouldn't attempt to make one myself, unless the financial savings were amazing.
I know that pure gold is much softer than alloys, but the color is unique and it's not too hard to re-hammer the surface to get rid of scratches.
My condolences about the gold coin. I've made similar mistakes. The most frustrating bit for me isn't the damage itself, but the fact that every time you look at the thing, you're reminded of the time you messed up.
But the message of a cast ring is "it never had a beginning or an end. It's forever"
And if you read OPs post, they care about symbolism.
I wrote an account (in French) here: https://seos.fr/blog/20240426.or.html but it's more for future reference for myself and for the friends who knew about it than anything else.
No one is! Magicians are just tricksters; they get copied all the time.
Your materials cost was $3,500. What is your time worth per hour times the number of hours spent?
Then we will have a more accurate estimate of total cost.
From the article. But I understand, you wanted to do your own thing (this dismissive comment of yours) for no reason. :)