bethlet.net

Orange ring!

Last weekend, I realized I had a $100 gift check from work that had been sitting in my purse for months unused. I had been waiting for something worthy to spend it on. Well, that's all well and good, but it had seriously been nine months. That's like the gestation period for a baby. So I decided I'd figure out what was worthy.

The answer, of course, was jewelry. So I trekked over to Metalliferous and picked up some silver, some silver wire, a digital calliper gauge, some needle files and some other useful stuff.

I have a book of jewelry projects you can make with cold connections. This means no heat required. This is useful when you don't have a soldering torch and don't really want to deal with that. Soldering is freaking hard and takes a lot more patience than I had for a 'first project in a long time'. I didn't want to be too ambitious. So I decided to do a three-layer ring.

I documented with pictures, for anyone who's interested. I'll put it in the extended entry. :)

So, first I decided on a design. The ring has three (or more) layers, and I wanted the front and back to be silver and the middle to be copper. In the design in the book, the ring came to a point, but I didn't think that was interesting. So I decided to do a little leaf motif. It looks kind of like an orange, so I dubbed it the orange ring.

The annoying part for me was drawing the perpendicular lines from which to measure everything from. It's not the easiest to do on metal and I hate measuring stuff like that.

As you can see, after I cut it out, it wasn't really the neatest...

But as we know, filing fixes a multitude of sins. The copper orange followed:

Then the silver orange. As you can see here, I just traced the original design onto the other metal and sawed it out from there. I cheated and used double stick tape so the metal didn't move when I was tracing it with my scribe. It worked pretty well, though if I had to do it again, I'd trace BEFORE cutting the center out of my guide piece. There wasn't a lot of space (2mm) around the edges of the first ring to stick the tape to.

Once I had all of those pieces filed down and finished around the edges, I got out the tape again, so they would stay still while I was drilling holes into them. First I drilled six holes around the first ring, then I taped that to the others (one at a time) and drilled through those holes again. The copper one was offset a little so the orange would show to the side.

Now came the hard part: rivets. The rivets keep the three rings together and are made with 18 gauge wire through the 1mm holes. Basically, you use the callipers to measure the overall thickness of the three pieces of metal (about 1.95mm), then add around 2mm to that. I actually used about 3.5mm of wire, after experimenting. In the picture above, the little piece of wire above the ring is actually about to be used for a rivet.

You thread the wire through the hole, then use a small metal hammer to tap the top, then turn over and tap the top, etc etc until both sides are mushroomed. It worked way better than I thought it would. If the wire's too long, it bends and it doesn't turn out as well. I dented the ring a tiny bit, actually, trying to hammer a wire that was too long.

It's really freaking hard to cut the wire. You're supposed to use a saw because wire cutters leave a bur and an uneven surface. But trying to saw a tiny piece of dead soft wire is ridiculous. It goes everywhere. I ended up using a wire cutter and then filing down the end. My fingertips are all raw but whatever. It was less frustrating.

After these were all connected, I just had to saw out the middle!

Then came filing (which fixes a multitude of sins) and voila! A new ring! [Picture above!]

I'm pretty pleased with it actually, and all in all, it was fairly easy. If anyone has any critiques or ideas for other stuff like this, I'm totally up for making jewelry for people. I'm all set up with my bench (for now, at least - trying REALLY hard to find a new apt that will accomodate its size) and I pulled it into the living room where there's TONS of light, and my TV. :)