What's cracking YouTube, Dan Rees here from www.ZebranoWoodCraft.com.
This weekend I'm actually on best man duty for a good friend of mine called Josef, and
he asked me to make him something special for his wedding ring.
So in this video I'm going to show you the process I used to make Joe's wedding ring,
which is made with: Damascus steel; Macassar Ebony; a Megalodon Tooth and two bands of
sterling silver.
So without further a do, let's make a ring out of a Megalodon tooth!
To get the party started I drilled a hole through the damasteel blank using progressively
bigger drill bits until I could use the boring bar to rough out the inner diameter of the
ring.
Next I mounted the blank on an expanding mandrel thingy and I was able to roughly machine the
outer diameter of the ring.
When I was close I used a couple of cutting tools to part off the 11mm wide piece of steel
I would use for the ring.
I cleaned up the outer edges of the ring, tapered the inside edges and used a rotary
tool to do a bot of shaping inside the ring.
To begin cutting my inlay channel I used a marking gauge to score lines around the ring.
When the lines were marked I was able to use cutting tools to rough out the channel.
I kept checking the width of the ring with my (broken) calipers to ensure I had a deep
enough inlay channel.
When it was roughly 2mm deep I used a knife tool and a file to square up the edges of
the inlay channel.
At this stage I sanded the outside of the ring from 240-1200 grit to remove any tooling
marks.
For the inside I used the rotary tool and a bit of sand paper.
You probably shouldn't sand like this in the chuck, but thee lathe was running slow and
I was careful not to lose a finger … just don;t try this at home!
With the scratches and tooling marks removed I used a red and green polishing compound
to bring the ring to a high sexy shine.
Alright, there's the ring that has been buffed to high heaven and I literally can't wait
to see what this comes out like after an acid etch.
To bring out the pattern of the Damascus steel I used a 40% Ferric chloride acid solution.
I cleaned the ring with distilled water to remove any grime then I suspended the ring
into the acid for about 20 minutes.
I've seen this done with warmed up acid but I don't have a stove in the workshop so I
just did it at room temperature and it worked fine.
After the relaxing bath I cleaned the ring off again and dunked it in a bicarb of soda
solution to neutralise the acid.
Alright so that is the ring after and acid etch, I've just gone over it really lightly
with a bit of 2000 grit to bring out some of the patterns.
I think it looks really really cool and the patterns have all come out just as planned.
Now it's time to inlay some wood and some god damn Megalodon tooth!
Let's do this!
I cut a strip of wood veneer that was 6mm wide an was a perfect fit into the inlay channel
and then trimmed the wood so that it could wrap it around the the ring once.
To prepare the wood for wrapping I sanded down about a CM of each edge so it was paper
thin.
The glue up was easy enough, I just applied a little CA glue and wrapped the wood in a
couple of CM at a time.
I used the back of a tweezers to press the wood in nice and flat and make sure the wrap
was tight.
Woods in looking sick … time to do some inlays!
Once again I used the marking gauge to score a line where I wanted my Megalodon tooth to
be inlaid.
With the line scored I was able to use a triangular file to carve the inlay channel to depth.
So for my inlay I'm going to use this Megalodon tooth and I bought this amazing specimen from
www.UKGE.co.uk.
The Megalodon shark was a huge apex preditor that lived 23 million to 2.6 million years
ago.
It grew up to about 59 feet which is roughly 3 times larger than a great white shark!
If you take a closer look it's actually chopped in half anyway, but I'd like to preserve as
much of this as possible.
To do this I am going to cut off a few tiny bits from the bottom of the fossil (to try
and make it look as natural as possible) then crush those bits into dust and stick them
in the inlay.
Imagine how many things this massive shark ate with this tooth!
I crunched a few pieces of the shark tooth off using a pliers and then put them into
an improvised pestle and mortar in order to crush them into dust.
To actually set the shark tooth into the inlay channel I used a toothpick and CA glue.
I just dabbed a little bit of glue in and then sprinkled some of the dust into the inlay
channel.
It took a few rounds to completely fill the channel in but when that was done I used a
file to grind down any excess so the fossil was level and flush with the surface of the
wood.
With my mega shark inlay done, I cut two more channels either side of it for my silver bands.
The silver bands were made with 0.8mm round silver wire that were just the right length
to encircle the whole ring with minimal visible joins.
This takes a bit of practice but I glued the silver in little by little by using CA glue
and a cocktail stick.
When all of the inlays were in I used a few grits of sandpaper to grind down the silver
wire and clean up any messy bits.
Time to Finish Him.
To finish the wood portion of the ring I used CA glue.
This is a delicate operation and takes a good bit of precision and dexterity!
To begin I wrapped a few layers of masking tape over the edges of the ring to minimise
the clean up operation after applying the CA glue.
Then I applied thin layers of glue to the ring with a cocktail stick and sprayed a light
misting of activator spray between coats.
This took a while but I carried on until the CA was level with edges of the steel ring.
After applying what felt like a million layers of CA it was time for a final polish!
I mounted the ring back on my spindle and sanded it with progressively finer grits of
sandpaper and micromesh until the finish was smooth and free of any tooling marks or scratches.
I actually etched the ring once again after polishing the CA and then used a buffing wheel
and my rotary tool to polish it all up with red and green polishing compounds.
Here's the final result.
So I'm really happy with the way that the ring turned out, but it doesn't matter what
I think, it doesn't matter what you think, all that matters is what this guy thinks...
“Does it fit?”
“Look at that!”
“Ooooooo”
“Let's give him a fist pump!”
It was a beast of a ring and an awesome project.
Joe loved it and him and Lauren had a fantastic day at their wedding in Cardiff!
Thank you for watching, if you'd like to see more of my work then please check out my Etsy
shop or watch more videos (links in the descriptions!).
See you in the next one!