I made this one night just to see if I could. I had a spark plug that I had
cut up to make an adapter for something and there was this piece left
over... I had a piece of 5/8 copper tubing and realized they were the right
sizes to try this. I was curious how far the copper could be worked.
I started by truing up the ends of my spark plug part. I then bored the center out to 5/8 inch. The copper tubing was annealed, inserted into the steel band and then the fun started.
A ring expander was used to start flaring the ends of the copper tube. Once I reached a point where the expander wasn't going to work any more I changed to some large diameter steel balls (I think these were pin-balls at one time). Once the balls wouldn't work any more, I just used a flat face hammer to roll the tubing over the edge of the steel band. A little Brasso and it looked quite nice.
In total I think I had about 2 hours in the entire project from the first though to cleanup.
The ring is too small for me to wear (about a 5 or so) and quite thick, so I don't think anyone who could wear it would. It was more a proof of concept type of project that did better than it should have. Had I known it was going to turn out like this I would have cleaned up the ends of the copper tubing before starting. I also would have been more careful about leaving marks on the inside of the ring from the expander.
To do it again, I would probably either bore the steel band to a larger diameter and expand the tubing to fit or find a larger standard size that would work. By making the steel band thinner I would get a larger ring size and a thinner ring that would be more wearable. Rather than depend upon the Robert Bosch Company to do my engraving I would probably either turn, knurl, or otherwise emboss or engrave something a bit nicer. The copper is likely to be an issue too, but some people can wear it without a problem... as I said, this was more about practicing a technique than making a ring.
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