Making my own wedding rings

Excellent post! Excellent problem-solving, and very nice result!!

Taking a completely direction, my wife and I made our own wedding rings out of stainless steel (a low-nickel alloy suitable for contact with skin -- 316L, I think), and we milled them on a lathe in my employer's machine shop after hours. Nearly 20 years later, and they have held up remarkably well.

If you're going to lathe a ring, make sure you do as much shaping and polishing before you detach it from the rest of the rod, and then create a mandrel that is the correct size to hold the ring (using friction) from the other direction. Hammer it onto the mandrel, do your final burr-removal and polishing, then pop it off the hammer.

Important side note: Don't do a test-fit before taking the burr off, or else you'll slice the skin on your finger all the way 'round in a very nice ring-shaped pattern and it will be the absolute dickens to try and get it off. Maybe don't ask me how I know...

For most simple designs, you should forge the ring and solder it closed instead of casting. Casting would be more appropriate for detailed designs that you don't have time to carve or hammer out.

When I was getting married a few years ago I started down this path as well. However I quickly realized I wouldn't be able to get the quality I wanted so I ended up finding someone who would be able to 3d print and cast my design. There are casting houses out in LA that will accept a STL file and will 3d print, cast, and finish your ring for you. The price is very reasonable, just labor and a bit of a premium on top of the spot gold price.

Using that experience I ended up starting a side business where I sell custom designed jewelry. My most popular design incorporates my customer's fingerprints. I build a pipeline that lets me go from a jpeg or other image file of the fingerprint to a fully 3d printable STL file (mostly using the blender python API). Because there are so many casting houses in LA they compete to keep the prices down. My completely custom rings that I have cast in small batches (compared to the large chains), are still very cost competitive with the competition.

If you are going to get rings, for the love of humanity consider getting moissanite instead of diamond. Diamonds aren't worth what you have to pay for them (try re-selling a diamond), and have a long history of BS associated with them.

If you are doing it because of the long history of giving diamonds, remember that the popularity of giving diamond engagement rings is younger than either US presidential candidate. :-)

I have a cute somewhat related story. I wanted to make really unique rings, so I decided to make them from some random metal from the forgotten realms of the periodic table.

I asked for a site that sells many rings of many different metals, with no luck. THIS metal, it turns out, is really difficult to cast. After many months with the idea shelved, one day my girlfriend found some chinese company that managed to do them. US$ 2k rings, and ugly as hell... but at least unique!

The girlfriend soon left me, but, well at least I still had the rings... until a few weeks ago when I noticed that I lost them too. C'est la vie :-)

A couple fun facts about casting metals:

Many of them shrink when they solidify. For the size and tolerances needed for a ring you can probably ignore this detail. You can get what is called a low-shrink mold made for some alloys that helps mitigate this if you want to make your prototype to finished size (or you didn't know better before you takes to the jeweler).

Patternmakers deal with this using what are called shrink rules. They look like regular rules, but are e.g. 5% longer. If you're buying an old rule, make sure you don't get one by mistake.

Silver rings, worn regularly, won't need to be polished to keep the tarnish at bay; the contact from your skin will do quite well enough. Our wedding rings are also silver, and I've only polished mine when I haven't worn it for a while. Ours probably don't polish up to quite the same luster though. They're a regular alloy of silver for jewelry and not silver and gold.

My wife's father was a gemologist and metalsmith. When we got married 42 years ago, he made both of our wedding rings -- lost wax casting, of course, since 3D printing wasn't a thing. Mine is a plain rose gold band, hers is antiqued gold leaves surround a diamond (he was an experienced gem faceter, but would not touch diamonds, which he'd rarely worked with, so ours came from a diamond dealer). He had me pour the gold for both rings. It's nice to have a story to go with them!

We had a great experience doing this in a much less hardcore way through this company: https://withtheseringshandmade.com/

I'd recommend to anyone who is interested but does not have the skills to make a ring on your own. Great weekend trip from Seattle too.

I am in the process of doing this as well, but I’m trying to stay on a tight budget.

After 10 failures and different trials, this is my rough process: - Melt fine silver with a butane torch

- Pour it into a circle mold with a metal rod in the middle (makeshift ring mold). I tried sand casting with a wax mold but couldn’t keep the metal hot enough to fill the chamber.

- Hammer the ring on metal ring mandrel to shape and increase the size. This took probably 5,000 light hits with a metal hammer, periodically annealing.

- Use a dremel and grinding stone to further shape it

- Sand and polish by hand

Since I shaped it with a metal hammer, it has a really nice and natural hammer finish that I plan to keep.

I’m considering trying to electroplate it in palladium since the fine silver will tarnish and scratch over time, but it’ll be harder to fix inevitable mistakes.

"this project took me six weekends over three months and cost around $3,500"

Your materials cost was $3,500. What is your time worth per hour times the number of hours spent?

Then we will have a more accurate estimate of total cost.

I custom designed a ring for my then girlfriend and sent it to Shapeways to have a mold 3D printed, then cast in silver. It turned out quite well (other than us having sizing issues). You can see my progress pictures here: https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/6292xd/i_design...

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Now, 8 years later, I'm really wishing I had designed my own ring. I would prefer to avoid the cliche metals (silver, gold, platinum), and I can't wear silver anyway (allergic). I would really like to find an interesting or unusual metal (scientifically or just in general) that isn't going to cause issues due to its hardness if my finger swells (titanium or tungsten are very difficult to cut off in those situations).

Does anyone have any material suggestions?

The vacuum is not necessary here, something this simple is achievable with sand casting (search for "Delft Clay") and a bit of practice. Ensure the sprue is wide enough and air channels are plentiful, make sure the metal is as hot as it's possible to get it, and pour swiftly in one fluid motion.

The snag is that you need about 3X your desired weight in metal, which in gold is... probably more expensive than the vacuum casting setup! So maybe the above applies mainly to silver unless there's a good use for the rest of the gold.

This is cool but for people without access to all the tools, a much easier way is to just upload your design to Shapeways.com and let them take care of all the casting. (https://www.shapeways.com/materials/gold)

You can also have your design done in brass first for relatively cheap, to validate the design.

I made our wedding rings that way, as well as quite a bit of jewelry over the years for my spouse. (pendants, earrings, etc...)

That's nice. I did something similar. By the deadline, I ended up just having shapeways cast my STL files. Ring is very nice, even if I merely designed it in OpenSCAD.

I did manage several failed castings.

There is no reason to use casting to make a ring that looks like the ring in the OP. Pour the metal into an ingot, heat and hammer it (like a blacksmith would) into a long bar. Then heat and bend it into a circle/ring, an then use flux to solder it into one piece which eats its own tail. (Yes I've done this, several times.)

If you make a ring as simple like this, just sandcast it. I also think the imperfections in these one-off rings are highly desirable, and emphasise the fact that it's unique.

My childhood dentist made several wedding rings, he had all the equipment to cast gold for tooth crowns.

My father makes fake teeth, so for my wedding, and also my sister's wedding, he cast the rings out of old gold scraps he had lying around. It's maybe the one possession I have that I'm extremely sentimental about.

Since the rings are made entirely of noble metals, they’ll never corrode

Just fyi, silver certainly can corrode, it is not quite as non-reactive as platinum group and gold. So don't go dunking your nice ring into acids etc, and salt water can be bad too.

Great project. Nowhere near as involved, but I've recently gotten into designing jewelry. There are some guys in my town who'll run up and cast prints, I just need to make the design.

Got me some big husband points one recent anniversary with that.

But I knew that jewelers are not magicians.

No one is! Magicians are just tricksters; they get copied all the time.

A wonderful and meaningful idea. The sentimental value of self-made wedding rings is immense.

Nice!

fwiw, people usually don't use a silver/gold alloy not because of cost, but because of hardness. But then, I like that for a wedding ring, it'll collect a few marks on the way - and that too is like a relationship.

As others have mentioned, a centrifugal casting machine would have really helped here. I took quite a bit of jewelry making in college and all the lost wax casting we did was done this way. The force of the metal filling the mold at extremely high speeds gets rid of most, if not all, of the impurities/inconsistencies.

Wind up the machine, melt the metal in a small crucible, drop the pin and duck (lol). I was once sprayed by a small stream of molten brass at +/- 1700 degrees (poor mold with thin wall, later fixed and recast) and still have a scar 40 years later to prove it.

Hope it’s permissible for me to post this… but if you’re looking to do this in the UK, these guys are great: https://maps.app.goo.gl/PtJpTBpkiDBSzFki7?g_st=ic

If anyone else wants to do this, coin silver is nominally cheaper and is significantly more durable, and about as easy to melt.

I view things like a furnace or nice blowtorch as an investment into future projects that may otherwise not even be viable (in my mind) without the knowledge that I have said tool, so a small furnace for melting, while being more expensive, might expedite the process or increase quality, while also opening doors to future potential endeavors.

Binged a bunch of ring repair/modification videos a while back, it’s fascinating stuff. It’ll look horrible for 90% of the process and right at then end suddenly change into being amazing.

I'm saving this under "for later use", "things to do when I grow a moustache" and "Ron Swanson / Nick Offerman reenactment" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NPKOGqXKLq4

My wife and I cast our own wedding bands too. She mentioned the idea of casting our own rings, and I remembered my friend happened to have made his own small foundry — a concrete lined paint can with some pipe and 10$ hair drier as bellows — a couple of years prior.

We bought some sand casting equipment and a thermometer and went over to his house. He had only ever used the foundry to melt aluminum, so we weren't sure it'd get hot enough to melt gold. We stuffed it with anthracite coal from a big bag he managed to get from a hardware store a while back, and sure enough, it got plenty hot enough. That 10$ hair drier really pulled its weight too, surviving hours upon hours of continuous use.

Before we bought any gold though, we did some test casts in aluminum. My wife, I, and a couple of friends melted down some cans, formed our sand molds with some cheap steel model rings, and cast some pretty bad rings. They weren't even rings, really, since they didn't even form full circles. But after a few more tries, we figured out better places to put air channels, how to pour the metal better, etc. and came out with some decent aluminum rings. We also cast some other trinkets like some dice and a little darth vader figurine.

More confident we'd be able to successfully cast gold rings, we ordered some 14k casting grain. When it arrived, we headed back to my friends house, cast some more aluminum trinkets to warm up, then my wife and I cast each others rings with only one small mishap; luckily gold can is easily re-melted. Breaking apart the sand molds to reveal the results was a tense moment, but they came out great.

We also opted for hammer finishes, and we're both very happy with the result. They have some small pockets on the surface, and we overestimated how much the rings would shrink, so mine's a little too big and I wear it on my middle finger, but we think of the defects as reminders we cast them ourselves. The end result wasn't the point anyway; if we wanted perfect rings we would have just bought some. The point was the experience of making them, and it sounds like the author had the same kind of experience, so I'm glad for him.

I’m reminded of the trial and error, the mistakes, the frustrations, the determination to keep working through problems, and the eventual beautiful success.

Hmm. That almost sounds like a relationship.

Best bit.-

Wishing them all success.-