For the past 2 weeks, in Beginning Metals, we have been working on hollow rings or a way to learning sawing, soldering with hard, medium, and soft solder, filing, and finishing. Yes, I do know these things BUT I have never made a hollow ring before so that was what I WAS LEARNING.
First we measured a finger for the ring hole and soldered it round and to one side of the ring, using hard solder. Then it was figure out what the side wall(s) would be and using various round pliers and round mandrels, form the side piece and solder it to the same piece of metal as the ring hole. It was on my way home that night that I thought I wanted to texture my surfaces so what did I do... I redid what I did in class and used my rolling mill to put a spiral texture on all the exterior metal; I unsoldered the ring band, cleaned it up and re-used it. I drilled some air holes to be a decorative element and using a setting burr, counter sunk them. I was getting ready to solder the other (shall we say back plate on) side on when I had the idea to do tube sets over the holes... This is when I realized that setting the stones would be rather difficult since it was a hollow ring. MY engineering kicked in and thought that IF I soldered a support wall, inside, and around the holes, it would provide the support I needed, which I did. And... then I realized I had more than enough 4mm CZ's but not enough tube settings and ordered them from Rio; I would have to use silver because they don't make brass one and I was not going to make them either. While waiting for the settings to arrive, I did the soldering of the back plate, trimmed and removed the extra metal. Yesterday the settings arrived and today I soldered them on; I had a little bit of solder creep and removed what I could because I forgot to mask the seams with white out; you can see it in the last few pictures. Then I set a green, yellow, purple, and lavender stone on each side.
First we measured a finger for the ring hole and soldered it round and to one side of the ring, using hard solder. Then it was figure out what the side wall(s) would be and using various round pliers and round mandrels, form the side piece and solder it to the same piece of metal as the ring hole. It was on my way home that night that I thought I wanted to texture my surfaces so what did I do... I redid what I did in class and used my rolling mill to put a spiral texture on all the exterior metal; I unsoldered the ring band, cleaned it up and re-used it. I drilled some air holes to be a decorative element and using a setting burr, counter sunk them. I was getting ready to solder the other (shall we say back plate on) side on when I had the idea to do tube sets over the holes... This is when I realized that setting the stones would be rather difficult since it was a hollow ring. MY engineering kicked in and thought that IF I soldered a support wall, inside, and around the holes, it would provide the support I needed, which I did. And... then I realized I had more than enough 4mm CZ's but not enough tube settings and ordered them from Rio; I would have to use silver because they don't make brass one and I was not going to make them either. While waiting for the settings to arrive, I did the soldering of the back plate, trimmed and removed the extra metal. Yesterday the settings arrived and today I soldered them on; I had a little bit of solder creep and removed what I could because I forgot to mask the seams with white out; you can see it in the last few pictures. Then I set a green, yellow, purple, and lavender stone on each side.
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