Embedded Files
By the time the twenty-fifth anniversary rolls around, a wedding band that has been worn regularly is bound to start showing a bit of wear. Sometimes the ring gets too uncomfortable to wear as the edge of the band has become, in effect, a razor-sharp blade. Not comfy at all. In a case like this, as well, the ring is a size ten while the owner's finger has worked its way up to a size twelve. This would also explain why the ring is no longer worn. Believe me, I've cut enough embedded wedding bands off the fingers of some of my more stubborn customers to know.
What we are going to do here, is to add enough gold to make the band wearable again, and bring the karat up to 14K, because that's just the way it should be.
Y'see, most people think that 10K gold, being harder than 14K, will wear better. Under normal circumstances, that may be true of a factory-made band that hasn't had any special treatment to harden it, but the fact is that 10K and 14K simply wear differently. When the surface of a 10K ring is scratched, material is actually removed; chipped off.
When a higher-karat gold is scratched, the surface material sort of moves aside, furrowing up on either side of the damage, but staying more or less in place. When next the ring is bumped, the material can be forced back down smooth, effectively healing the scratch. When this is done on purpose, it's called burnishing, rubbing the surface with a hardened, polished piece of steel.
In order bring the karat of the old ring up to 14K from 10K, an equal quantity (in this case 2.98 grams) of 18K yellow gold was added. This is just simple arithmetic that manages to avoid any plunges into the depths of the algebraic formulae that are necessary when changing the karat of a sample. That's a problem for another day.
Since six grams is still a fairly stingy weight for a proper gent's wedding band, nine grams of additional new gold is added to the mix. This also ameliorates the problems that can arise when old gold is remelted.
All the gold is put in a crucible and heated to melting point. Then, in order to ensure that the new and old material are properly mixed, the metal is allowed to harden in the crucible and, before it gets too cool, the hardened puddle, now called a button, is flipped over and remelted. When it's all nice and flowy, it is poured into a properly prepared ingot mold. there is often a tiny amount of gold that sticks to the mouth of the crucible or dribbles down the side of the cold mold. This is just embarrassing.
The ingot, or bar, is now rolled down to the projected measurements of the desired band, allowing for stretching and distortion and magic. There are mathematical formulae for this as well, but I usually rely on experience and a certain amount of luck. It's worked well for me thus far and the other way takes way too long to explain.
The bar is bent around before cutting it off to the proper length. This is so that there is no distortion at the ends, where they will be soldered.
The solder used is also 14K, but has a melting point just below that of the gold itself. This yields a very hard bond that is important, since we're going to be subjecting this piece to a major amount of abuse.
At this point, the ring is a couple sizes too thick, too angular, and a couple sizes too small, which is good because we're going to hammer the bejeezus out of it.
Using a small ball-peen hammer and extremely banged-up mandrel, the ring is roughly rounded up and given its initial shape, since we are shooting for a low-dome, half-round band. A classic.
The hammer blows must be very consistent, and the ring flipped often to avoid distortion that would necessitate a lot of extra filing. In addition, the rolling mill is used to keep the sides of the ring consistent and flat, but I didn't take any pictures of the process, so we won't worry about it right now. Suffice it to say, the process moves along quite quickly if you take your time. If you rush it, you'll be at it all day. Life's like that.
About half-way through the process, the ring is heated up red-hot and then plunged into water to anneal it. This relaxes the crystal structure of the metal, lessening the likelihood of the aforementioned distortions creeping in or, worse yet, causing the ring to crack.
In most cases when making a plain band, this will be the only time it's annealed. The rest of the hammering is carried out with less and less violence to feather the ring up close to the right size, and give it its final shape. When the shape is right, and the size is just short of the desired size twelve, it's time for finishing.
if we've been careful, and we have, the ring will look pretty much like a ring by this point, so it's only necessary to remove all the hammer marks. First, the inside of the ring is finished. This is the way to go, because if there are any problems, they tend to show up on the inside first. Besides, the size of the ring is the only real measurement that matters, all the rest is design. We'll also curve the inside of the band slightly to make it more comfortable. It's called a comfort fit for that reason.
The rest of the process is simply one of removing the evidence of the previous process: Coarse file to give the proper shape (not realy necessary here); Medium file to remove the coarse file marks: Fine file to remove the medium file marks; and sandpaper to remove the rest. Rushing any stage, or trying to skip one, only extends the process, so it's best to make certain that each stage is complete before moving on. For this reason, it makes sense to try to do each stage of filing or sanding at a right angle to the previous step, as it is so much easier to see what more needs to be done.
The last stage, of course, is polishing, and I prefer to have everything very smooth and consistent before polishing so as to limit the amount of time spent at the polishing machine. I hate polishing. I even hate saying it.
The very last part of the process is engraving and I seriously hope I wrote down the initials that were to be engraved inside, because the original ring is long gone, or at least fully homogenized into this one. That's the beauty of it.
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