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Now that we have a lovely, and jeezly complicated cluster head made, the job is more than half done. It's time to put together what, for some reason, we've always referred to as a "Wing Ring". I suppose it could be called a shoulder ring, since it has raised shoulders rather than wings, but I've stubbornly avoided logic in my naming protocol thus far, and I'll be damned if I start now.
The original ring, also made by me and crushed by the customer, had some shortcomings that I was more or less glad to have another shot at fixing.
You'll notice (or, more to the point, I will) that the tips of the shoulders on the original ring, shown above, join up with the cluster head in a very delicate way. This was by design, of course, as I wanted the cluster to appear to be floating above the rest of the ring to give it a bit of magic. In retrospect, this was short-sighted, because I wasn't aware of the punishment that the ring would go through. There's no way to know these things beforehand, of course, but it still bugs me. That being said, when the ring did get whacked, those points remained intact as the rest of the cluster was compressed and bent.
The remedy to this is simply to make the shoulders a little higher and wider so as to present a more robust solder joint. Simply. I'll let you be the judge.
The concept of the wing ring is an old one, but in its common configuration, the shoulders are often added to the ring as a bit of an afterthought. This would put the solder joint on the outside of the shank, which goes against everything I hold sacred. My way seems, of course, needlessly complicated, but it has always worked well for me, so that's the devil I'm stuck with. I could also have welded the joint, eliminating the solder altogether, or cast up the piece from a wax. All valid methods, but not the one I took pictures of, so there.
Since platinum is so recyclable, we can reclaim the pieces left over from the cluster head project and add enough new material to melt a new smartie. This is sufficient to make a nice bar, which is cut into two pieces more or less as shown.
The bar is cunningly rolled to a double-ended, half-round taper, and the centre bit forged down to produce the ubiquitous squares at the back of the shank. This being a rather top-heavy ring, a bit of a counterweight is desirable.
The main portion is bent around and hammered gently into shape. What you want is a smooth curve fitted to the mandrel, with the shoulders extending straight and symmetrically up at the predetermined angle. As I keep pointing out in this little endeavour, I'm not giving any dimensions because this is not a blueprint, it's a recipe that can be adapted to many different pieces. This particular project is very unusual in that I have the opportunity to reproduce a previous piece, and improve it where I see fit.
The inside of the shank is now notched to accept the inner portion, which is likewise filed to fit. I like to fit flats to flats in cases like this because trying to match inner curves to outer curves is an exercise in frustration. It is crucial to keep the notches the same length and depth, as this will affect the thickness of the shoulders of the ring, and we don't want them to be unbalanced now, do we?
It would certainly be preferable to weld these joints, but that would be at the risk of messing with our all-important symmetry, so I use the hardest platinum brazing solder available. This stuff has a scary high melting point and leaves virtually no seam, so it will have to do.
Once it's soldered, the whole assembly can be forged and filed to shape. I would have preferred the bumps on the shank to be a bit bigger, truth be known, but I already have a hell of a lot of time invested in this piece, and the customer wasn't sure she liked the bumps anyway, so it's an inadvertent win/win situation.
At this point, fitting the head begins. A carefully centered hole is drilled to accept the post, and little notches filed or ground into the tips of the shoulder for the claws. This part is muy importante, so a lot of fitting and filing is carried out before doing any real finishing work.
In this case, only the inner areas of the shoulders are polished because it's going to be impossible to get in there in any effective way afterwards. This is one of the main benefits of working in platinum; a lot of the finishing work can be done before assembly, because there is no risk of fireskin, as there would be with gold.
Because I am neither hero nor idiot, I didn't use the high-temp brazing material for these joins, but they have been so well fitted that no finishing is really necessary. Simply cut off the excess post and file it flat. A small circle can be discerned on the inside of the ring, but we have ways of dealing with such matters.
Burnishing is hugely important when working with platinum, it being such a bastard to finish properly. Mother of all mixed blessing, don't you know.
The entire inner surface of the ring is burnished, with extra attention being paid to the area of the post. Then it is sanded, lightly burnished again, then sanded again with very fine silicon-carbide paper until it's all but polished. Skipping this detail will cause nothing but trouble later, so ensure that each step is perfect before moving on to the next.
Now the magic happens. Each surface is burnished and fine-sanded to within an inch of its life and the whole shooting match polished up. And then burnished, sanded and polished again because this is, after all, platinum, and you're never done polishing platinum.
Setting the stones is yet another matter we aren't going to get into in this venue, but setting in platinum is a true pleasure when compared to working in white gold. The metal doesn't have any bounce to it, so once a tip is laid down, it stays down. Using the setting pusher to shape the tips and smooth them down against the surface of the gem is also simpler.
And there it is. A thing of beauty and a joy forever, or at least until a bad thing happens. That's the thing about putting a ring like this together; you can make it strong and lovely, but it's still going to get worn, and sometimes abused, so all we can do is build in enough structural integrity that anything that does happen can be blamed on the wearer and not something we did.
I make my stuff to last.
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