Ring Making: Making A Chain Ring From Scrap

1. Making a Chain Ring: Hi, my name is Huiyi. I'm a full-time professional jeweler based in the UK. I have been making jewelry since 2003. Join me in this class and I will walk you through all the steps from creating an ingot, from scrap sterling silver, to achieving a professional finish on your ring. Step-by-step. In this class, you will learn how to make your beautiful jewelry from beginning to finish. When you finish this class, you will be able to make your own chain ring from scratch. The skills you practice in this class can also be applied to working on any precious metal and base metal jewelry in your future projects. For instance, you will learn how to make a silver ingot. How to take this ingot and from it create first square wire then round silver wire that can be used in many different kinds of jewelry. With this wire, I will show you how to cut. And solder the jumprings into a chain. And then how to take that chain and form it into a nice ring. By the end of this class, you will know rolling. Wire-work soldering and ring making techniques that you can use to make many different types of jewelry yourself. This class is good for anyone who is interested in wire making and ring making. Some previous ring making experience would be very helpful, but not necessary as I will be explaining every single step in detail, right? I will see you in the class. 2. Project Overview: Thank you so much for joining this class. Let me show you what we're going to make today. First. We're going to make a rough ingot from scrap silver. Next, we will be taking this ingot and forming it into a square, And then round wire. From this wire, we will be making the jumprings and then using them to make the curb chain. We will then be solidifying this chain and forming it into a nice-looking chain ring. The reason I chose this as my second project is that it covers such a wide range of jewelry making techniques. They can be used in many different future projects. Wire making is a vital part of any jewelers repertoire for making everything from ear studs to chains and rings. Whether you are a novice trying these things for the first time or semi-professional, looking to brush up on your techniques. This class will be very useful for you. I look forward to see your beautiful jewelry in the project section. Now, let's get started in the next lesson. 3. Casting the Ingot: In this project, we're going to use clean scrap silver, but to make our ring, all the tools I use are listed in the PDF file that you can download from the resource section. Here, I use an ingot mould to cast my silver. I normally put some engine oil to help the melted silver float. I use propane gas for my torch. You can use other types of gas as well. I just found the setup for propane gas is the cheapest, and simplest. Before melting the silver, let's put some borax powder on top of the scrap. It helps the silver to melt and float. When you see the fire bouncing back from the crucible with a soft orange color like this. We know we are using the hottest part of the flame for our job. And we should keep the distance between the torch and the crucible like this. During the entire process. You can see the flux we put earlier start to first expand, and later shrink. That is totally normal. The melting point for sterling silver is about 890 degrees Celsius, which is about 1,640 Fahrenheit. How long you take to melt the silver depends on the room temperature you are in. If you are in a cold winter's day, it will take longer than if you are in a hot summer's day. In my case, the environment, I'm in is about 15 celsius, which is about 59 Fahrenheit, it takes about five to 10 mins to get the silver 00:02:16.460 --> 00:02:19.910 from solid to liquid in such a room temperature. So we just keep the fire like this and wait for it to melt. Here we can see the silver start to melt. Because I have some silver dust in my scrap. I give the crucible a gentle shake to help it mix with the melted silver. Once everything has turned to liquid, you can see a very beautiful shiny mirror-like surface on the top. When the silver reaches this temperature. We can start to count for about 15 seconds before we pour it into the mold. The reason I say 15 seconds is to make sure our entire material is melted evenly. The trick when pouring the liquid silver is; try to keep the torch flame above the lip of the crucible. So, as the crucible moves along the gap on the mold. The torch goes along with the crucible. In this way, we can make sure the suilver flows nicely into our mold. The ring we're making in this project, weighs about 3 grams. The silver I've got here is over 10 grams. So I have poured the silver into three separate pieces and only use the small one. This piece will do for our ring. Next, we're going to clean this piece of ingot. 4. Cleaning the Ingot: After the metal is heated, I normally like to leave it on a piece of metal to cool down to room temperature. Here you can hear the crucible we just used. Have the cracking noise. Tip it over and leave it to cool down. If it is not facing down, when it cracks some of that extra flux, may fly out and cause casualties. Now we have this ingot here. You can see the glaze in dark brown color on the surface. We want to take it down by lightly hammering the ingot. In this way. When we dip this piece of silver in the safety pickle, it will save lots of time. Otherwise, we could take more than an hour to get this flux dissolved in the safety pickle. Makes sure to wear a pair of goggles to protect your eyes when hammering the ingot. Use a hammer to lightly hit the surface like this, just to break the flux glaze. Now, if it's not all, most of the brown glaze is gone. Next, we dip the ingot into some safety pickle. I just use a casserole dish directly on my electric hob in the kitchen. Simply heat it up for 2 mins. In this way, the safety pickle is warm enough, but not boiling. After that, we can leave it here until the ingot, turns completely white. Then we know it's clean. Now, we can rinse it in tap water and it's ready for the next step. Making the square wire. 5. Forming a Square Wire: In this lesson, we're going to turn the ingot we just cleaned into a square wire. Here. I use a rolling mill to help me do the job. What we do is to start from the biggest channel on the rollers and gradually reduce to the smallest one. After a few rounds. We can see the rough shape of a very thick square wire. During this process, make sure to keep measuring the size of the silver. The guide is that we need to soften this piece of silver at least once every 1mm It goes down. After the silver is stretched by the rolling mill. The silver turns hard. If we don't soften the silver and keep stretching it, then it will crack. As you can see, it's 4.3mm wide at this point. The process of softening it is called annealing. By annealing the silver, it allows us to keep on changing the shape of the silver without any damage. To anneal the silver we will use the same torch that we use for making the Ingot. All we need to do here is to heat the silver evenly until it turns orange. In broad daylight, once we can see it glows slightly orange, we know its job done. Again. Leave it to cool down to room temperature. And then we can put it in the safety pickle to clean it, until it turns white. This is the second time we have put this in the safety pickle. As there is not that much to clean, it will be much quicker than the last time. I would say about 5 min. to do the job. Here, I use time-lapse to show the process. After rinsing it in tap water and drying it. We're back to the rolling mill to repeat the process. For every 1mm the wire goes down. Don't rush it. Making jewelry is all about being patient. Keep measuring, rolling, annealing, cleaning, and then back to rolling again until we are down to the smallest gap on the rolling mill. This is how our wire looks like, after it went through the smallest gap. Let's check the size. It measures about 1.1mm square and about 1.33mm diagonally. This is the smallest, the rolling mill can take this wire. In the next lesson, we're going to put our square wire through a round hole. This will transform it into a round wire and eventually reach the final size of 0.8mm diameter for our chain ring. 6. Forming a Round Wire: To make the wire round, we use a round draw plate as our wire measures 1.33mm diagonally, the first hole it needs to go through is the 1.3 mm one. The rule here is to anneal this wire after every two holes it goes through. So we need the end of this wire to be smaller than the 1.2 mm hole, which is right next to the 1.3 mm one. Keep filing it until it fits through. Make sure at least about one cm will go through, so we will have enough wire for the jaw tongue to grip onto. The first is the 1.3 mm hole. After dragging a little bit more through, we move the jaw tongue back to grip more wire before the entire wire is pulled through this one. Otherwise, we're risking the wire breaking halfway through the dragging process. After it has gone through the 1.2 mm hole, I come back to file the end of the wire to make sure the end will go through the next two smaller holes. I like to curl it up like this. Before dragging it again, let's anneal it to get it softer. I use the same torch here. Once the color of this wire shows a slight orange glow, we know it's enough. When cooling it down. I like to put an iron on top of my wire to make it cool down quicker. Now, we can keep on reducing the diameter of this wire without worrying it will break. From here, we just keep repeating the process of dragging the wire, filing the end of the wire down to fit the next two smaller holes, annealing, and then cooling it down again and back to dragging the wire until this wire finally goes through the 0.8 mm hole. Then this wire is exactly what we want for our chain ring. In the next class, we are going to make jumprings using the 0.8 mm wire we just made. 7. Making the Jump Rings: To make this ring in US size six, we will need 32 jumprings. In this project, we are going to use these looping pliers to help us. As you can see, this pair of pliers has six different mandrils. The bigger one at the very end measures 3mm diameter. This is the one we're going to use to make our jumprings. I'm going to show you how to use this very interesting tool. Basically, we have our wire go round and round like this. As you can see, slowly, we're making a coil. When it's towards the end of the wire, we push it onto a hard surface like this to bend it. Next, we use a pair of cutter pliers to snip our jumprings out like this. Now, we can harvest our jump rings. The next lesson is the very exciting one. We are going to make the chain. 8. Preparing the Jump Rings: Before we join each link, we need to open all the jump rings widely. Like this. Just simply twist the end of each jump ring with flat pliers. This will take a few minutes. When we come to the last jump ring, we close the ends tightly, like this. This is going to be our first link in the chain. Coming up next, we will solder the jump rings together to make the chain. 9. Soldering the Jump Rings: Now with all the jump rings wide open. We can focus on joining them together. First, we need to cut some hard solder. The reason I use hard solder is that it has a higher melting point. In this way, when we're soldering one jump ring, we don't need to worry, that the previous one will melt. There are 32 jump rings. So we will need 32 small pieces of hard solder, at least. Next, we solder the first jump ring. They are many ways to put your solder on. I show the way that works the best for me. In this case. I like to put the solder down on the flat surface, dip the jump ring into the flux, and then put it on top of the solder. In this way, the solder won't jump away as it is heated up. To cool it down faster. Let's dip it into some cold water. Here. The first one is done, and we're off to the next jump ring. Like this. We close the second jump ring. Now. It's ready to fill the gap with solder. Again, there are many ways to solder. This is the one I prefer. The more ways you know, the more options you have. After trying all the ways, you know, you will find a way that works the best for you. Now, we're ready to put the third jump ring on. Make sure the third jump ring goes through both of the previous jump rings. Then off to close the gap with solder. When it comes to put the fourth jump ring on, the gap between the previous three becomes quite tight. Here. I use a soldering pick to push through where the fourth jump ring should go. Basically starting from the third jump ring onward, every jump ring has to go through the previous two. And then close the jump ring with your pliers. Fill the gap of your jump ring with hard solder, dip it into cold water to cool it down. And ready to repeat these steps for the next jump ring. This is how your chain will look after putting the fourth jump ring on. These jump rings measure about 5mm diameter. If you find, using your fingers to put the jump ring through is really hard, you can do it with the help of a pair of tweezers. We repeat this process until all the jump rings are on our chain. This is the chain you will get after you have soldered all the 32 jump rings together. In the next lesson, we're going to flatten this to a curb chain. 10. Making the Curb Chain: Here's the chain we just made. Now, we're finding which way we need to twist the chain. You can try in both directions. When your chain looks like this, you know, this is the way you want for our next step. Next, we use a pair of flat nose pliers to flatten our chain. Like this. Keep doing it. Until the entire chain is flat. It's useful to have three hands at this point. Here we are. This is what we need. Let's lay this flat on our soldering board. In our next lesson, we are going to solder this chain to form a single solid piece. 11. Soldering the Curb Chain: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to solder this chain. To apply the liquid flux, we can simply brush it on the entire chain. Previously, we used hard solder to close the jump rings. Here. We use easy solder for this step. Next, we put our easy solder in the middle of the chain. Like this. These are the places where we want them to join together. Now, it's ready to heat this chain up. And melt every single piece of our solder. Start from one end of the chain and all the way to the other end of this chain. This is how our chain looks like, now. Here, we can make our chain straighter and flatter with our pliers. To make our ring stronger, we are going to solder both edges of our chain. After that, this is how the chain looks. Now, in the next lesson, we are going to form the ring. 12. Forming the Ring: In this lesson, we're going to form the ring. This is the ring bender we are going to use for this lesson. To start with, we can use the 18 mm diameter set of round dice. Next, we use the smaller size down, which is the 16 mm one, and then the 14 mm set. To minimize the marks on the surface of our ring, we need to use the white set of dice, which are made of hardened plastic. You can see the ring beginning to take shape here. Now, in the next lesson, we are going to complete the ring by soldering the two ends together. 13. Soldering the Ring: Welcome back. This is how the two ends of our ring look like at this stage. To complete the ring, before we solder the two ends together, we need to cut off the excess part like this. And then flatten the end with a file. As we can see. There is still too much material on. Remember, if we have too much material on, we can always take it away. But if we have taken away too much, we will have no way to put the silver back. So we need to take a slow and careful approach when taking material away in this process. As they say, you can't rush art. Slowly, we will get there. Now. When we put the two ends next to each other, the pattern it forms is just like the pattern on the rest of the chain. Next, we use the half round forming pliers to bend each side to close the ring. Like this. When closing the ring, we are using the tension of our material to push the ends together. Now, let's solder the ends together. This is how our ring looks like, totally out of shape. In the next lesson, let's adjust the profile of our ring. 14. Adjusting the Ring: In this lesson, we're going to make this ring straight and round. Two steps in total. First, to make this ring straight, we put the ring on top of one steel bench block and gently hammer it on the top. Using another flat steel bench block, like this. Slowly, we can see the ring becomes straighter. Next, we need to make it round again. Put our ring on the round ring mandrel, and then lightly hammer it with a flat hammer. Like this. Now, our ring is round again. However, it's heavily covered with fire stain and flux, very messy. In the next lesson, we are going to clean our ring to reveal its true beauty. 15. Cleaning the Ring: In this lesson, we're going to clean our ring. First to dissolve the fire stain on our ring we dip it into the safety pickle again. The same solution we used previously. Heat the safety, pickle up for about 2 mins to make it warm, but not boiling. We can just simply leave it here until the entire ring turns white, and then we know it's clean, and we can rinse it with tap water. Next, we use a small piece of sandpaper to gently polish off any sharp edges on our ring like this. In this way, we can make sure the ring is smooth to wear. You can see there are some bright red colors on my sandpaper, it's the powder from my other jewelry making classes. Here on Skillshare. You can check out that class from my profile. It's about how to turn any of your used color pencils into wearable jewelry using very basic tools. I just reused the same paper here. This is how our ring looks like on the finger. To give it a shiny polish, I'm going to put this ring into a magnetic finisher, though there are other ways to polish the ring, such as with a rotary mop, if you prefer. Using the Magnetic finisher, is the easiest way for me. You can see many tiny stainless steel needles are hitting the ring. This action will give an even shiny finish on the surface of our ring. Set it on for 15 mins. Here we are, rinse our ring with tap water. And here is our finished curb chain ring. Coming up next, final thoughts. 16. Final Thoughts: Well done. You have made it through all the lessons. Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope you have enjoyed it. Now you have learned some more advanced jewelry making skills through the art of chain ring making. You now know how to make an ingot from scrap. How to turn your ingot into square wire. How to turn square wire into round wire. How to cut, prepare, and solder jump rings, ring making techniques, and how to achieve that professional quality finish for your jewelry. I hope this class inspires you to create your own beautiful ring. If you have made a curb chain ring or any variations, based on what you have learned here. I would love to see what you have created. You can post your work to the project gallery on the class page here on Skillshare. If you found this class useful, please leave a review. For any questions, do post on the discussion section. Make sure to follow me on Skillshare here, to stay informed of my upcoming classes. If you're interested in seeing me making jewelry, or footage of behind the scenes, you can find me on my YouTube channel by going to my Skillshare profile. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. See you in the next video.