Opal inlay rings: how I make them.

good day everyone welcome to the openwheels today we're going to be making a inlay ring similar to the one i made in a video a couple of videos ago that i didn't show the full process of so this time we're gonna see everything i do including the making of the ring for an inlay ring so in the last video i'd yeah started with the ring made and just showed a bit of the um inlaying and then finishing off um i've got one of you guys once a couple of the blank rings made up so we're gonna do that and another one or two um with the inlay in it finished so we'll get to see the whole process but for starters i'm just gonna start how i do this this is not a how-to as much as you know i'm doing it and i'm sure you could too but this is how i do it so i'm sure there's many ways to do this um go through the tools silver we've got five mil uh flat and i think it's about one 1.2 mil thick um over here we have some two by one mill so that will sit around on the edges all the way around the ring each side and some solder so that's all the silver that we're going to be using for this and tools needed other than the blowtorch and the flux over there um and pickle solution obviously the soldering equipment but we're just going to use a mandrel for rounding everything out saw for cutting stamp from identification snips ring forming pliers some flat pliers and a couple of hammers one will be a metal flat faced one and the mallet and some inlay so let's just have a quick look at the inlay since it's opal it's very hot in the shed today so uh the light's already gone so we're going to use an outside light source glam to see this but we've got some nice bits of shell there's not much could have been done with so that's going to be some of the inlay a few more bits most of this has got to be tidied up and into little slithers ready to be inlay pieces some really nice coloring amongst this so it's going to be fantastic looking ring don't have that being made by mistake check him over there that's going to be a really nice centerpiece try and get two slices one for each ring that we do inlay um a bit more purple we may add a couple more bits to that we'll see how we go when we cut start slicing it up and seeing how much we need so first we're just going to start making the ring which will be zoom out a bit stand up straight which will be the five mil band and i'm going to make two s size rings uh get this out of here so what i'll start doing is that's where the oops that's where the s is i'm going to start making a a ring sorry that's where the s is i'm going to start making the ring down here and bending it i might go and anneal this actually before i bend it just make it a bit more soft and pliable and start making it down here so that when i slide it down it stays nice and round whereas if i start putting on this here any deviations once rounded out we'll slide it down further so we want to make it to start with nice and round down here and then we slide it up to the size we want and then we guesstimate mark it and see how we go so i'm going to go and anneal this first annealing process is heating the metal as the molecules in silver are all stacked evenly spaced when they're happy let's put it that way when we bend silver we're stretching one side and squishing another and the molecules are bunching up one end and then stretching another and if you keep bending it that way you can end up with splits in the stretch side so to even out and balance out those molecules again we give it a bit of heat not to get it cherry red but a dull red and that helps the molecules and the silver relax as i was taught so you want to relax these molecules and then they evenly space and that way when you can bend it a bit more without splitting so that's just what a kneeling process helps to do so yeah i might quickly go and anneal that and come back um i might as well show you [Applause] okay so we've got our piece of annealed silver got a nice square end to start off with and we're just going to make it around near the s mark but just a bit higher so i can slide it down afterwards and this should be reasonably pliable so we got to do it by hand so it's nice and tight there slide it down i need to get this tab here down a bit so i'll just push that out of the way for a second now i can figure out where i want to try and get a better shot of this so you can all see so where i've got the s i'll hold it just above and that way i'm going to be able to look down there and line up where i think the cut should be so with that i'll use a razor blade i think that's too much it's gonna be way too much so we'll back it back a bit i reckon about there yep so i'm going to cut it that second mark this one and see how we go welcome to the airplane wheels well we don't know what we've done until we've done it all right so we'll slide this on and see how we've gone look at these two ends to sit flat looks like it falls short but the ring's not perfectly round that's past the mark too by the time they come actually together and then back on the mandrel that'll be an s so we'll go and solder this one up and prove me right to do this i'll grab our flat pliers and do what i refer to as sort of breaking its neck just going same this side so our two ends are more pointing straight at each other then i'll grab ring from ring forming pliers round side in and i can just push it one side hit the other that gives it the tension on the join i'll just align the joint a bit straighter too much and again good attention and there we go very nice join slightly out beautiful tight joint inside sides top which is important otherwise you get a bit of a saddle effect in the join when you're polishing and sand yeah when you're polishing because the solder is softer than the sterling and we'll wear a little bit out and then your join mark will just show straight up again so that's important so let's go solder this all right first thing we want to do is just give this a good coating and i'll just chuck the whole thing in flux down one side flip it over there we go we got our titanium pick a little bit of solder here so we need just tiny bits i'm just going to burn this is my process again not everybody does it this way if anyone but i like to burn the salt flux off first before i add the solder that's the color i want that so i'm just dipping my uh titanium pick in a bit of flux a little bit of flux so i can pick up the solder and carefully place the solder at the join reapply heat now just to make sure it goes through to the back you spin it over there we go you can see the solder's all nice and shiny all through the join so yeah straight over into the pickle okay i'll let that pickle okay so here we go out the pickle nice and clean ready to be put on the mandrel and made round i'll zoom out for this bit and with this we're just going to use the mallet [Music] as you can sort of see this high on low spots where it touches and doesn't and i'm hitting this spots where it's raised off and it's sort of hitting in a down sort of slight motion so it keeps bringing it down now we're just above s at the moment so we're going to give it a couple of hard strikes and by the time we've completed that we're right between the iron t on the s so take it off as the mandrel is conical shaped i.e it's not parallel it tapers in towards the top which means this edge here is wider than this edge here because this one hasn't been stretched or straightened because it doesn't reach the mandrel because of the taper so you switch it around and hit it from the other side and straighten this side down and there again right between the r and t we're going to lose a shaving off it as soon as we do a bit of sanding on the inside anyway which not by much but may bring it down a little bit more so i always leave a bit of room for that so now we have that round we need to flatten out these edges and that way uh when we put our sides on and they sit straight they'll run all the way around true so for that i'll grab a file of course one clear bit of bench space the file moves in one direction usually only um so if you were to use a file and as you're filing forward that's your grinding power or filing power as you're dragging it back it doesn't file this way it only files this way and if you keep running it back and forth too hard on the back as well as the fourth you actually can blunt your uh teeth on a um file so always put it down this way and direction of travel towards the handle hopefully the ring fits on the file without the sides skipping over we get a weird looking effect i've got to keep it there so i'll use my thumb and my finger as a guide and just give it a bit of a scuff up turning around as i do it and then we'll have a look so let's zoom in again there's a couple of spots around here around the edge here it's a bit white still as opposed to the silvery spots it's actually done so i'm going to keep going it hasn't even touched there yet there's a little bit of an inconsistency in the join that's me so yeah okay i'm happy with that now for the other side and there we go i'm happy enough with that so we'll do the other one as well if we can locate it there it is it's right in front of you phil so here's the second one we've made two size s okay so there's both of them virtually perfectly as perfect as we're gonna get it flat you could almost solder these side by side a really nice join thinking of even making a one two three double wide inlay i might do that in a future video we're doing this for this video because this has been pre-ordered so the next step we don't want a bit of a a bow in our silver as when we bent it you can notice slightly these corners are raised up higher and there's a bit of a saddle sort of sag in the middle so we're going to have to flush that up just to highlight it i'll just quickly touch this with the file and as i run the file around like that you can see it's not touching the center at all because the sides are high so we need these sides flat to get a nice fit with the sides that we're going to put on for the edges so i'm just going to go around and file that and there we go all done it's one little line right in the center there i've got out i want to set a bad example let me get him out there yeah so now we're ready to make the sides we're going to use this one mil by two mil rectangle wire and it's gonna go end on that way all the way around so we're going to anneal this so we can bend it sideways all right so here we are back with our two mil by one mil and we're not going to bend it around this way we're going to bend it around this way so this is going to take a bit of finesse so i'll start up here and try and get the bend started as close to the end as possible i may end up having to lose that tip afterwards to bring it back to where it's curved nice enough for my liking because it may make a bit of a mess so we want it to bend perfectly sideways as we can so this may need a second annealing as you can see it's on the curl on me so you'd be constantly chasing those out but nonetheless curving it that way i'm just going to do it a little bit and probably make a large u by that time i'll give it another annealing now you can sort of see what i mean that as i'm curving this this inside edge is getting squished in and the outside edge is getting stretched if i do it too much in one hit i may get splits through here and i don't want that so annealing it will align those molecules back to even again then i can go and bend it as if it was uneven bent yet type pliability all right so i'm going to stop there then i'm going to go over and get this to flatten out again okay so we can see the size of this against the size of the ring so now i'm going to come back to this edge and start tightening up this curve which is why i didn't do a full circle to start with otherwise other than that with probably two full circles which i don't need but i will because i'm doing two rings but it's easy to just do one at a time so let's get back out of the way here let's tighten this edge up a bit let me start checking it that's starting to contour a bit tighter but not quite yet let's look a bit better sorry a little bit tighter i'm trying to do this with a length of wire sticking out the end here it's a bit awkward so i want to go from about there which was there it's wow sorry guys open up a bit here look at around here it comes to there let's come back here a bit now it's starting to fit nice and tight not a hundred percent we can correct that in a bit see if i'm good enough all right so here's where i can start judging where i want to cut it you can always file a touch off after but we need to separate it from the main part all right found my magic marker so i'm just gonna go on here and i'm gonna in my head account for a bit of the overhang i'm not gonna account for it too much because i don't want to come up short so you can see that my mark is there which while someone that pulls in get rid of that i may have to still file a little touch so we take the ring out find our mark and we'll cut okay so we're gonna put this on the mandrel let's get a light tapping to get some of those lumps out it's a bit of gentle persuasion [Music] so yeah i'm confident that'll fit by the time i neaten it up so what i'm going to do same as the ring break the neck just going to take it out of our nice little round try and get that joint as nice and neat as possible so we're gonna solder that okay so we've got these out the pickle a little bit out of shape from being soldered so we need them round so we're going to get them gently onto the mandrel because we don't want to stretch them out and we're just going to take out the inconsistencies in the round so they're pretty much flat but just out of shape so this is very gentle tapping with a flat faced little hammer knocking stick and so i'm just going to go around and give it to it where it needs it on the high spots be careful not to put it out of shape and that way it won't be stretched because i don't want this to have a oops have a wobble around it once i've finished i need to be straight slowly letting it slide down by itself just checking that the space is even [Music] so now we can sort of check it against our ring see if it's a nice tight or no fit they fit preferably because we're going to file it a little bit so that's not going on very easily but i can see how it wants to very much want to so i'm going to stop there on that one and do the next one here comes the fun part getting these on and staying in place if they're a little bit big that one's perfect which is good make for a nice flush join [Music] let's push it down a bit it's sitting perfectly flush all the way around that's awesome i'm going to get solder that one as is for our moves see if we can get another one on a couple of taps on the mandrel and that just went on flush that's two on before i push my luck i'm going to go solder those so let me get some flux on where i want it not only where i want it around here try not to have too much solder flowing anywhere else then i might want to go where this flux hasn't been i really hope this doesn't start moving around on me when i heat these up and these outer rings can sag down one side if they they relax a bit it's not quite a tight enough fit but i'm hoping i've got it [Music] all right so just gonna get some flux on the situation and better chop up some salt so this is our solder comes one mil wire there's just snip off lengths about three mil long and probably use about four or five on each piece sorry all right first things turn your volume down on your light okay here we are we'll solder it up yeah it's just tidy up around these ends and that's where we're going to be doing a bit more filing again just scuffing it up seeing where the high spots low spots are obviously it's not a perfect fit so yeah this may take a little while might come back in a bit all right so i've gone around the best i can i'm just going to go around this edge as well and i'm going to start on the paper so for this it should be pretty well level just want to give it a nice finish especially around by the join there we go so now it's a little filing on the inside get rid of the sharp edge we'll give these a stamp and then get to the sanding all right so now we need our 400 grit eraser to remove some of these scratch marks our magic markers left [Music] all right so we're up to the 1200 sandpaper on all these these two are going to get polished i'll wait until i've finished these off to polish it all at once but these will get the wax than the rouge and these will as well but these ones are getting some inlay so that's what we're going to sort out next so i'll get some opal out okay so this is our opal we're going to be using some of it we'll need cleaning up and slicing to get a couple of bits out of some of it and nice bit of purple there so i have to get thinned down a bit more and um sliced and it's got some fractures in it so i'll work around that so we'll get to start just cleaning these up i'm going to start with this piece can't really see too much color from this side light's all behind i haven't got the light on the camera because of the heat it won't come on so i'm going to get all this dirty stuff off thing is staying out and i'll keep checking it against the ring to make sure it's going to fit in there all right so i've started cleaning some pieces up this is what we're going to start with anyway for one thing so after going edgeways it's going to be the patch on that one probably gone that way but it was too thin of course the black glue should set these off quite nicely nicely chips to crystal so i'll let them dry out and get ready to glue them in okay that took a little bit and to uh slice all these bits up and then reshape them each one has to have kind of that shape so it um continues on the round as you put them next to each other so i've got some arrows drawn on for these ones i've pre-placed in the ring and started the pattern and sort of alternated with purple and color purple color purple color so we're gonna mix up some resin with our dye and aerodyne epoxy a couple of toothpicks here one for mixing one for the color ship's over here so i'm not leaning on that that's my bench peg doing that um yeah i'll uh get a bit of this out start mixing start putting him in i won't be able to talk too much and hopefully i don't go off camera hey guys you need a little bit that's plenty got a quick little mix oops so colors starting to come out of the jar must have got pretty hot out here near that much just put a little bit there keep that over there so it's quite a lot in there you guys so then it's just like laying bricks except again i put it away [Music] so there we go that's the start of it just gonna let that sit for a minute clean my fingers up [Music] here we go i'll leave that to sit do the other one all right these are all done it's dry only one problem someone forgot put a stamp on them i'm not gonna put it on now let's smash everything so anyway we know the sewer we're gonna put on a dopstick and we're going to go and face it this up flame on just pushing all the wax up to the top just slightly dumping a stone to sit evenly and just sort of push it around over there a bit that way it can't slide back out there we go one down i only got one stick so we'll be doing one at a time so we'll head back over to the wheel start turning this around now when i cut this the idea is i'm going to come from both sides and i'm not going to have the wheel flat i'm going to have these slightly well angled that way to hit the silver edge and leave it sort of raised up a bit towards the middle and same from the other side until i hit the silver and then i know i can start getting the polish on it without eating into the silver so we'll go get this on the wheel see what it looks like all right there we go so i'm just going to wear them down evenly hit the high spots first so [Laughter] all right so you see we're getting down to it now and it's just going across this edge with this one a bit of a angle [Laughter] as you can see it sort of touched both sides but mostly this side spots that'll come out after so now we're going to work the other side this edge there we go so now we're going to give that a nice polish up you see it slightly raised in the center probably not much we're going to polish the silver and opal all in one hit nice so over to the cerium oxide all right so from here we've got to take off this sharp corner up here and here all the way around the edge right so the vertical 90 degrees virtual 90 degrees so uh it's very sharp so we'll take that off and go back over it with the 1200 and get all this excess glue stuff off and uh get it polished up all right all finished so the two blanks size s and here are the two finished ones so there we have it i hope i've somewhat explained best i can how i went about making these so i haven't left anything out and yeah there's many a way you could probably make the ring up and inlays just being very careful cutting your bits to size making sure they all fit before you start putting them in and yeah have fun they're not super hard but they are a bit time consuming but yeah well i say they're not super hard if you've done this sort of thing um but yeah so there we go i'm gonna leave this video here i've got so much to get on with and these are taking over three to three to four days it wasn't feeling good yesterday so i think i had a bit of a day off but there we go all done um other videos we've got coming up will be some more doublets uh cutting some stones and i've got the new attachment that's going to be the next video i forgot to tell you that so i have the new attachment and yes next video i'll do a video with that to show you what it's all about so yeah i'll leave this one here and get on with that and see in the next video cheers here we are my good sir i hope they're happy i hope you made them the right size

Channel: The Opal Mills

Views: 26,836

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Id: cXEUBwe83HM

Length: 52min 43sec (3163 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2022