No Lathe - Silver Ring from Scraps on a Budget

hey guys today I'm going to be taking all this excess silver strap that I've had piling up over the years and we're going to turn it into a ring and the goal here is to stay on a tight budget so I'm not gonna be using my $500 jewellery torch gonna be using this $50 map gas torch I'm not gonna be using my $500 lathe I'm just gonna be using this simple jewellery roller and then again to keep things simple I like to use a solder paste it has flux within it so you use no need to purchase flux and then for shaping just going to be using my metal mandrel here and a rawhide mallet let's go ahead and get into it all right the first step is going to be selecting some pieces to melt and then pouring them into a simple mold I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of these just for now we'll pull them out later when they're needed and for molds I like to keep being super simple I just got a little piece of plywood and some popsicle sticks I'll show you what I do throw down a bead of glue use some accelerator you can use hot glue for this if you don't have superglue twist accelerator tuck that in place the goal here is I just want a nice little rod of silver when we're done alright this should be good to go I'll just pick out a few scraps that should work nicely for us [Music] it's a little crucible I forgot to mention this in the intro you can get one of these for really cheap just on Amazon just go ahead and put your metals in there now I'll use the map gas keep this up get it molten and then we'll pour it into our mold alright and from melting just make sure using a map gas torch this will get to a much higher temperature than a butane or a propane torch will it's enough to melt the silver and just don't hold it upside down while you're going you want to hold it about like this alright ready to pour she'd just pop right out got ourselves a nice perfect little stick of silver got this extra piece here I'll just throw that back in my scraps melt it down again later all right I've got my silver rod almost ready to go I want to put it through my roller to give it a domed profile here but first I need to give it a more consistent elongated shape so it'll fit in there properly so I'm just gonna set the roller to the proper height and I'll do that now [Music] [Music] all right I've got the piece to the dimensions I want now it's time to shape it using the dome section of the roller [Music] all right the shape is now perfect exactly where we want it I need to go ahead and flatten this out but first I need to anneal it because as you work the material and squish it it hardens and over time it's going to develop cracks so I've done this about four or five times along the way it's really simple just heat it up to the point where it's just barely glowing red-hot and then go ahead and quench it in water all right we've got our flat stock all ready to go here nicely shaped now we need to cut it to the correct length for my ring so to do that I'm going to pull up my ring size chart will have this linked in the description if you don't have one but I want to do a size 10 and a half ring so I need to go to the circumference I'm going to use metric so sixty three point one millimeters now if you don't have calipers you can use a ruler I'm going to use my jewellery saw for this you just have a hacksaw that works great too if you've got a dremel you can use that as well again just trying to use whatever materials we have and what tools we have to do this on a budget so I'll just try to cut this nice and as straight as possible [Music] we're ready to start forming this piece into a ring so we'll get started on that but first I like to save my scrap so that we can do this again in the future so I'll just set these aside all the dust here I'll sweep up that's what's so great about this is that every time you do it you get more scrap so it's just kind of like a never-ending fun project all right now it's time to shape this bad boy so I've got a block of wood here a 4x4 as well as my ring mandrel I'm gonna go ahead and start shaping it with a rawhide mallet but I like to do is take just a pair of pliers I have soft jaw pliers here but because we're trying to do this on a budget just get a regular pair you don't need to buy a $15 pair of pliers just for this wrap some electric tape around this alright these are ready to go just hold this in place and just start forming it into a circle all right I've got a nice curve going to it so far it is really tricky to film here on my workstation things are bouncing around it's hard to hold things down I'd rather be on the floor on the cement but it's really hard to film there so I'm struggling through it but it's working okay now I'm gonna go ahead and just on the wood block continue that curve I [Music] don't want to overdo it here all right things are looking really good you'll notice at this point there's a little bit of a warped oval shape to the ring that's totally fine all you should be worried about at this stage is just making sure that you've got a nice roundedness to the whole ring you don't want any flat sections so now I'm ready to focus on the joint you'll notice it's not looking very good I want them to meet together flat like this right now it's looking more like this so we don't want that gap in there so what I need to do is I need to spread these back apart just a little bit and I'll go in with a hand file and file them to shape to be better this is going to make the ring a little bit smaller than I wanted but that's okay I might just have to wear on a different finger than I originally intended to [Music] all right now I've got the ring just how I want it you can see that gap is a lot nicer those are matching up really great now so it's time to go ahead and we're going to solder this together all right just solder instead of using a fire brick this is just folded up tinfoil again we're trying to keep things cheap and simple got it set up on this wooden block then I'm gonna go ahead and apply the solder paste just along the seam [Music] alright I've got my paste applied I'm not using little solder chips or solder wire that makes things so much easier and again I don't need flux because the flux is containment to the face so this makes seem super quick and efficient and cheaper and then to melt the solder I'm going to be using this butane torch if you don't have one of these you can use the map gas torch it's just a little more tricky and be very careful not to melt the silver now I'm just gonna go ahead and go for it I'm not going to put any heat directly on the solder I'm gonna aim for the back of the Ring and as it starts to melt maybe I'll get a little more heat up towards the front but because silver conducts heat so well I don't need to really put so much heat blasted straight on the solder just kind of go in a circle heat it up nice and even you can see that solder paste and staying in place pretty nice put a little bit more heat up front solder is almost there alright I gave this a couple of minutes to cool down it's looking great I'm gonna go ahead and form this back into a perfect circular shape and then we'll start sanding and polishing it all right it's nice and round all that's left to do now is just sanding and polishing so I'm going to do this by hand just to show that it's possible if you have a dremel or a way that could really help speed it up but I'm going to start with a hundred grit and you use that to get rid of the solder joint any residue left over there and I'm just going to go through all these different grits and then I will use my Dremel to do the final polish you can polish by hand is just a lot harder and less effective all right that took a considerable amount of time to do by hand rather than on the lathe but it looks really nice sanded it all the way up to 1200 grit now I'm going to take this buffing attachment for the Dremel put a little bit of polish on it and we'll get this thing shined up if you don't have a dremel you can do this by hand you see the little paper towel rub it on there but it's gonna take so long Dremel so you can get search rotary tool and Amazon they're like 15 bucks so I would highly recommend what if you don't have [Music] all right here it is finished check that out that's a really nice shine especially for all being done by hand look at that you'd think this was done on a lathe perfectly round it's really nicely right on my ring finger so really happy about that and as you guys know silver develops a nice patina over time so what you can do is you can just polish it you know it only takes a few seconds you can keep that shine up or you can encourage that patina in fact if you want to force that patina and you want to develop one right away you can use a chemical called liver of sulfur and I'm going to show you guys just how to do that all right I've got a cup of hot water here just a little bit in the bottom and then a cup of baking soda mix with water to neutralize the liver of sulfur now open this up too much if you find it it's not dark enough on your rink we've got a little bit more do it again all right I got the ring here I'm going to give it a little bit of a quick wash down it's alcohol on the paper towel like it's any grease off of it that's important because you won't have an even consistent finish if you don't do that okay now I'll just dunk it in give it a few minutes we'll check on it in a sec all right it's nice and dark let's check this out all right you can see we've got a nice dark even consistent finish on there I'm gonna take a little bit of steel wool I'm gonna distress it make it look a little bit more natural all right after a few minutes with the steel wool check this out that's exactly the finish I was going for just a little bit uneven dark everywhere just looks like an antique ring that's a hundred years old love that look and what's so fun about this is you can just polish it again and literally just thirty seconds and flip it around so it's a lot of fun jewelry is a good time anyways guys that is the tutorial if you have any other questions I'd be happy to answer them down in the description let me know if you would like another future tutorial where we try to take the budget and the number of tools needed even lower there's a couple of things I can do that are quite extreme but I think we might be able to make it happen so let me know thank you guys so much for watching and I'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Patrick Adair Designs

Views: 117,198

Keywords: how to make a silver ring, how to make silver from scraps, how to make silver jewlery, how to make silver rings on a budget, making silver rings from scraps, how to make a silver ring without a lathe, how to make a ring with no lathe, no lathe silver ring, silver ring on a budget, how to use a jewelry roller, gold ring, how to make a wedding ring, diy wedding ring, patrick adair designs, inlay ring, casting silver, silver smithing, silver casting, silver ring without tools

Id: MB6DJ4UC9_U

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020