How to make a gorgeous mixed metal braided ring

[Music] this video I'll be showing you how to make a ring similar to this one using just sheet metal and wire so I'm going to need to figure out how tall I want to make this ring I'm just gonna measure my ring I already made and then use that as a reference I'm going to add a little bit to this measurement because I know I'm going to have to take away a lot of material so let's make it about 6 millimeters tall so I will just take my calipers and scratch this into the metal so I'll have a perfectly straight line so now we're going to need to do some math and figure out how long this piece needs to be before we cut it out so we have the right-sized ring all you need to do is measure the inside diameter of the ring or the ring sizer tool that you're using to make this put that number into a calculator and then just add the thickness of the metal you're going to be using and then multiply that by 3.14 and this will be how long the metal needs to be for the ring so just set your calipers and then Mark your metal it's easiest to do this on a piece of metal that has a right angle on it because it already has flat edges it makes it easier for you to work with when I'm working with scribed lines like this that I need to cut out with us all I usually mark it with some sort of sharpie or pin and I'll rub the excess of it off with some rubbing alcohol on a towel real quick so it will keep some of the ink down inside of the scribe marks so I can see it better so now all I have to do is cut it out with a jewelers saw and clean it any burrs up with a file now we just need to anneal this piece so we can start forming it into a ring [Music] so after annealing it should be easy enough to bend it around your mandrel by hand and then hammer down the other end it doesn't need to be a perfect circle at this point because we're going to bend down both ends and match them up to be as flat as possible on one side this will make for a stronger solder joint rather than having a curve to it to make our solder joint as strong as possible we need to make these super tight and then we're going to cut through it with a saw so it's to perfectly flush edges coming together and then we can solder it this will make the solder joint uniform all the way through and have no gaps or breaks in it and will make it weaker basically you want to see no light through this gap anymore so now I'm going to solder this piece together using some hard solder and this little third hand making sure to flex the piece thoroughly around the joint after punching it in some water make sure to check that the solder float where you wanted it to and is in between the seam and there's no cracks or bubbles or missing spots so now go ahead and put it back into your mandrel and shape it into a round ring using a rubber mallet or a rawhide hammer this will be the base to the entire ring so make sure to pickle it to get any fire scale off and then we could start on our next ring that goes around this so next up we're going to anneal some two millimeter copper wire they're gonna be the bands that go around outside of our ring if you're not really comfortable or familiar with making basic bands I suggest watching some of my other tutorial videos they go over them and a little bit more depth than this one will this one's basically just showing you how to put everything together and finish it so I'll have some links in the description and I'll have some end cards at the top of the screen right now pointing you towards those tutorials so to find what length you're going to need for the outer bands make sure you measure your inner band the outside diameter of that your inner band that is then take the thickness of whatever you're wrapping around it and add it to that number and then multiply it by 3.14 then you'll have the number for the band that you need to make to go around this and then just take that material and cut it to length round it around the mandrel and then solder it like we did our first band after you have both of those made you're gonna want to test fit them onto your centerpiece if they do not fit you can put them onto your mandrel and Hammer them out a little bit more to stretch them and if they're way too small you did something wrong and you're gonna have to remake these pieces so up to this point I thought I had some of my brass wire available to use for this project well looks like I don't have any more at all and all I have is copper and that wouldn't look the same on this so I'll be making my own thickness of wire using my roller mill but it's going to be square so it's going to look different in the round wire version that I made and I don't know exactly how it's going to come out but we're gonna see and you could just see how I'm gonna take this rod and turned into the right size wire for what I need to work with and it becomes super long from going through the roller mill so many times also so I don't have to do this again any time soon I ordered the right size wire which is 1.3 millimeters thick and that's what you should be using if you're following this tutorial so here's the wire that I modified and it's the right size so we'll see if it acts the same or if it comes out completely different so now we're gonna make some twisted wire using a drill and a mini vise you can also use a pair of pliers that will have a good enough grip to hold on to this also before doing this make sure to anneal your wire to make it easier to twist I have a whole video on how to make twisted silver rings I'll put a link in the description and in the cards above so here's a wire after it's been twisted it looks like a part of it bumped up I should be able to hammer this down and make everything uniform so this should work perfectly fine but before I do anything with it I need to make sure to anneal it because the twisting will harden your metal and make it very hard to work with so I got that all cleaned up and fixed now I'm going to make sure that it's gonna fit between the other two bands on the outside of this ring and it looks like it will so I'm going to take my measurements like I did before and cut this piece just like last time and make another ring just like the other ones so if you didn't know how to make a basic band or a ring at the beginning of this tutorial you should be pretty good at it by now because basically this ring consists of four different rings all put together so finally we have all the pieces we need and we could test fit everything at once I can already see a major difference with the wire that I made it sticks out a lot more than the other one did so I'm gonna have to grind off a lot more material and hopefully it still leaves the nice braided pattern through it but before we figure that out we're gonna have to sound on our pieces so they have flat edges to have solder flow through them and everything will stick together easier I'm going to use 220 grit sandpaper to do this and it should take away a decent amount of material to make them flat [Music] so now that everything's nice and flat I'm going to pickle everything to make sure it's nice and clean for solder just before I assemble all these and have them soldered together I want to make sure that they're not all Wiggly or bent or anything fat and as flat as possible so I'm going to test them on my bench and hammer them down as needed [Music] and now we're going to flux everything and assemble it with solder between each layer I'm only going to be using four points on each layer to solder everything together also the solder I'm going to be using is EZ solder because I want it to flow as fast as possible without melting any of the other solder joints which I used hard solder on [Music] when soldering this piece you're going to want to quickly move the flame over it in circles and slowly heat it up until the whole thing is a uniform glowing red [Music] you so the solder didn't flow how I wanted it to so I'm going to have to pickle clean and reheat this piece again but before I do that I found a couple warped spots that I would like to hammer back down to make this more flushed with itself so after all that and having this piece cleaned completely in the pickle solution I put some more solder on the back end of it because I didn't see much connecting it to the center piece and I'm going to have to reheat this whole piece to red-hot again to make all the solder flow and hopefully this time everything will go where I want it to leaving all these problems and mistakes in this tutorial to show you that you do have to problem-solve when making pieces and it's actually a better way to learn by messing up and having to do it over for messing up and having to figure out how to fix it and it sticks with you better than just getting it perfect every time so it looks like this time around everything flowed properly and all the problems that I had around it the ring are now fixed so now all I have to do is pickle this and then we can move on to the next step which is going to be cutting down the metal and finishing up the piece so comparing both of these it looks like we're gonna have a different pattern going on in the middle of this once we cut down this band but it should come out fine so the first part we're going to cut down is the sides the reason why we're doing this is I want it to be flush with the center and it's not right now so I'm going to use a file and slowly file them flat you can also just use a high grit sandpaper and move the ring around on it which also would take a long time or use a flat lab machine which I have but I wanted to show that you can do this with a hand file so there we go we got this side pretty flush and now we move on to the other side [Music] so to clean off any tool marks from the files I'm going to use 250 grit sandpaper on both sides and just kind of smooth them out so I'm going to shave down the braided part of this so it's flush with the two side copper pieces how I'm going to do this is use the mandrel and Hammer this onto it and then use a file in a curved motion all the way around until everything becomes flush I did the same thing with the round wire but it doesn't stick up as much as this one did so you take up a lot less material and it's a lot easier to do and there we go everything is all flush but all the grooves are now missing because the material was thicker than the last one so what I'm going to do is clean it up with an 80 grit sanding wheel and then I'm going to manually cut in each one of the lines just to get a little bit more detail so to cut this I'm just using a thin diamond bur tool on my flex shaft you can also use this in a dremel or just about any rotary tool you have I'll make sure to leave a link in the description of where I got this set of burrs so here are both my rings side by side as you can tell there's a big difference between the braids on both of these I do like both of them for what they are I prefer my original design to my newest one but but both of them are very interesting looking and nice-looking rings with all that's out I still need to clean up the inside of the spring so outside of it and smooth it all out to leave no tool marks and get it ready for darkening and polishing so now that the piece is all clean and I've also cleaned off the entire surface with some rubbing alcohol I'm going to be using this this is Jack's darker for a brass copper and bronze and all you have to do is paint it on with a paintbrush and let it sit once it's dark in to your liking you can then wash off the remaining chemical with some soapy water and then dry it off so now we're just going to use a felt buffing pad and some polishing compound on our rotary tool to wash this whole piece up keep in mind that buffing something makes it extremely hot so if you have something to grip it with or some leather gloves this will help you a lot and it won't burn your fingers so here are both rings completely finished in side by side as you can tell they have a different look to both of them but like I said I like how both of them look they also both fit and have no sharp edges and are pretty comfortable on my hand the same method can be done with gold and silver also or a mixture of silver with brass or copper you can also play with the thickness of the wires to make different designs since I have a bunch of wire coming in for just this I'm going to be making a bunch of different designs and posting them up on my Etsy store so feel free to check that out I'll also be posting pictures of them on my Instagram page [Music] so thank you for watching my video and I hope it helped you learn how to make creamy similar to these you have any questions or anything feel free to message me or leave a comment below but I'm recording this I'm almost at 4,000 subscribers I'd like to thank everyone for subscribing to my channel and I'm happy that I'm able to help so many of you well I guess I'll see you guys in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: GomeowCreations

Views: 409,802

Keywords: braided ring, mixed metal, gorgeous, twisted copper ring, GomeowCreations.com, Twisted Silver Rings, beginner jewelry, 101, how to solder jewelry, Nancy Hamilton, Soham Harrison, metal working, art, copper, brass

Id: c5paxsrEV1w

Length: 16min 51sec (1011 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 31 2018