Transcript:
Hey, everyone, this is my wife, Carly! Hello, so what are we going to be doing today? We’re going to be making your wedding rings. Yep, so this can be a really special moment in my career as a ring maker and just as a human being in general, I’m really excited to be sharing it with you guys. You guys mean so much to me so without further? Ado, should we get started? Let’s get started cool. Shall we shall we first? I’ll draw a dimension cross-section view of the ring. I always like to start here when I’m doing a complicated ring. It just makes all of the steps so much easier now. Because this is going to be my wedding ring. I wanted to have Carly my wife. Be as involved as possible just to make the ring that much more special. So I’ll have her explain the steps that she does now. I spent a lot of time considering. What exactly I wanted to go in my wedding ring? There was at least 10 materials that I considered having in the ring, But the three materials I decided to use are meteorite rose gold and carbon fiber. These are three of my favorite ring materials and together. They look amazing plus. All three of these have somewhat of a sentimental value to me as a ring maker next, we selected a ring blank and used a hydraulic press to separate it from the main piece of meteorite. Then I bored out the inside, So it fit on a ring mandrel. [MUSIC] Now this next step was a little bit tricky because this blank was so uneven. I had to carefully and slowly even it out using my carbide laid bit and because it was so uneven, it was violently shaking the lathe back and forth as I was doing this, So that’s just an example of how meteorite can be just a little bit trickier to work with than just a standard raw metal. [MUSIC] Now i’ll trim the outer diameter, measuring the calipers until it’s the right size [Music] now that the outside is perfectly circular, we can accurately size up the inside to its final dimensions. [MUSIC] All right, that’s all we need to do to the meteorite until we come back and combine all of the components. Now let’s get started on the carbon fiber for this step. I used patchage supplies. Diamond hole saws to cut out a blank. [MUSIC] The water cools the hole saws and keeps the carbon fiber from burning. [MUSIC] Now this next step takes quite a bit of experience to get Just right. I’m carefully sanding the inside of the carbon fiber, so I can get the precise fit that I want over the rose gold ring liner. [MUSIC] Now, instead of making Carly, repeat that process, I’ll simply split the carbon fiber in half using an arbor press and we’ll get both pieces that we’ll need. [MUSIC] Next ill sand the rough edges flat now using my new Pepe tools ring expander. I’ll go ahead and expand both of the rose gold accent pieces because they’re a little bit too small to fit over the rose gold liner at the moment. [MUSIC] perfect now! We’ve got all the pieces. Ready to go, lets. Go ahead and stack them all together and get an idea of how this is coming together. Next, we’ll fire up our Orion laser welder and begin welding the ring components together [Music]. I always love working with the laser welder. It really does feel like something out of sci-fi. The way it works is it shoots out an incredibly powerful but focused beam of energy that will instantly liquefy both of the metals and weld them together. [MUSIC] [Music] [Music] now because carbon fiber is in a metal, we’ll have to use adhesive instead of the laser welder to join them with the rest of the ring and this will still be very durable because carbon fiber works with adhesives much better than metals do [Music] now Ill sand away any excess carbon fiber with a 400 grit belt, Sander. Next I use a dremel to gently sand down the outer diameter and make all materials flush, Patrick said. I have to use a dremel because lathe bits can tear out Larger. Chunks of carbon fiber and metals can smear leaving jagged lines between materials. [MUSIC] Now I use 220 to 2000 grit, sandpaper to get surfaces completely smooth and ready to polish. [MUSIC] Then we’ll use our astrotech jewelry polish to get the final finish. This does a great job of polishing, not only the metals, but the carbon fiber as well now for the final steps. We need to do, I’m going to take over because they can be a little bit dangerous. As always, I like to use a dremel to round out the inside of the ring and give it a really nice comfort finish, and then from there just like on the outside. We use our sandpapers and polish to give it a really nice, glossy. Finish now, Here’s the ring unetched now. We’re going to break out the nitric acid and bring this ring to life. Nitric acid is extremely dangerous, So I’m definitely being very careful when I’m handling it and I’m making sure that I’ve got great ventilation. [MUSIC] [Music] all finished, this ring was made of six individual pieces with very tight tolerances, so this was a lot of work and it required a lot of planning and careful crafting, but the end result looks great, and I’m really happy to have such an amazing and special ring that my wife was able to help me create. I had a lot of fun working on it and loved the way it turned out, like, always. We’ll have this ring for sale on the website so you can click the link in the description to check it out. Thank you so much for watching. I feel like the last five years of my life and career as a ring maker have led up to this point, and I’m really excited to be sharing this moment with all of you like and subscribe if you enjoyed the video and I’ll see you next week.