Making a Spinning Coin Ring (in depth)

Look at this thing. Now, that would make a really cool spinner ring. Hey, Skyler here from Change You Can Wear and Sojourer and Fine Jewelry. So, today we're going to be taking this guy. This is actually a coin that Jason from Jason's Works had made before a coin ring convention. Believe it was in 20 Well, it says on here 2018 and it was in Dallas. And these coins he designed specifically to be made into rings. So, that detail was specifically designed for coin ring making. And I got to thinking, let's make a regular base, a silver base, not a coin, and then put this as the spinner on there. I think that look really cool. Let's give it a shot and see how it goes. So, the first step, we need to make an ingot. And this is an ingot mold. So, you can do round if you wanted to. Um, I'm going to do I usually use this to be honest. I don't really use the round one too often. This is an adjustable ingot mold. So, I'm going to set this thing at probably about 9 and 12 mm. So, what I'll do, set this guy to 9 and 1/2 mm. Something close. And then slide it until it stops. That's about right. And we'll lock it down with this guy. Sometimes it will move whenever you get done tightening it. So it's always good to check after. It's a little bit bigger. That's good though. So ultimately I want it to be about 10 mm, but when you start rolling out this ingot, it'll it'll fatten up a little tiny bit. So just shy of 10 is kind of what I'm looking for. The silver we're going to be using is some scraps from other rings I've made and just other ingot moldins that you know I poured and then just a little bit extra coin silver just to make it about an ounce. I want to cast about an ounce ingot. So that's what we're going to use. And I keep all my crucibles separated by whatever metal that is. This is my silver one. So we'll throw all that in there. And then before we get started, I always run straight propane, no oxygen at first, and just kind of soot up the top a little bit. That way the silver doesn't stick to the top of your crucible. And then we're going to heat this thing up so that way it doesn't spit the silver back out whenever we go to pour it in. [Music] Ah, do that again. The camera angle screwed me all up. Okay. Actually, after I pulled it out, most of it poured in there pretty good. I thought it was a little more messed up than that. And it's got these sharp edges and stuff. So, I'm going to file those down before we start rolling. And then another important thing is anneal it. Even though it just got poured, you anneal it before you start rolling again. [Music] That's probably good. Get that thing quenched. [Music] So, we'll put the camera in the way. Usually, I'm behind it and just kind of reach over. So, I'll tie do it sideways, which is a little bit more clunky. That's one thing about filming, that's my main dislike, I think, is it just breaks my workflow so much. The funny thing, too, is it's kind of weird how many people ask, don't buy like a regular coin ring on my website, and then they'll be like, can you make a video of that and put it on YouTube? I'm like, no, no, it takes so much more time to do that. And not to mention, how many of these random coin ring videos would I have to make? Not interested. All right, we're going to go reanneal that cuz it's starting to harden up. Yeah, you start rolling this out too aggressively. You're squishing too much too fast, it'll start cracking. If you uh wait too long in between the meals, it'll start cracking if you don't pour a good ingot. and it kind of cools and in between pores and stuff, you'll definitely get cracking. That's what I was worried about with this one, but it came out pretty good. This guy renealed. That's pretty good. See how we did on width. Hey, just over 10. Look at that. Perfect. So, we'll cut one of these ends flat. All right, that'll work. I want this to end up being a size 11. And this is going to end up folding bigger than the size 11. So, what I started doing is I have this ring sizer thing and I just checked to see what that actually is. It's a little bit smaller than 11. And they never quite get all the way tight enough to that. That's a good starting point. I'm going to actually shrink that down a tiny bit. Um, so anyway, when you start bending it around there, you'll get close to that size, but you're not going to actually get down to that. So, I'm going to go down just a tiny bit more and make it a little smaller than an 11. And then I'll stretch on the mandrel to get it exactly where I want it to be before we cut it. So, what I tend to do, I never get it perfect right at first. This is always kind of in the way of getting a perfect check. So, what I'll do is I'll guesstimate where I think that's going to fold in. with a little bit extra. You always want a tiny bit extra. About there so that way you can cut more and uh get it exactly perfect. This haymaker saw I really like. I like the depth and everything on it quite a bit. But one thing I didn't really understand, everyone's always so worried about the balance of a saw. And maybe I'm just too dumb to realize how important that is, but they had these uh little aluminum I mean the saw frame itself like the front right here used to like have this bulbous thing top and bottom. I'm assuming it was for balancing it, but man did those get in the way when you were actually trying to work with it. So, I cut them off. All right, we'll take it back over to that um ring bender. And this ring bender actually it came from Pepe Tools. Actually, Skip King from King's Coin Ring Tools, if you guys remember him. He's actually retired now, but um he sent it to me as a gift one one year. Man, what a useful tool. All right, that's close enough. We'll check it. And what we'll do is check this out. See how that gap kind of flares in there? We're going to run our saw blade through there a couple times and make that gap super tight. Whenever you go to solder a joint, you want there to be just it's just perfection in between. You don't want the solder to be trying to fill some big gap or something. It's not really meant for that. Woohoo. Now we're good. And so I just want to make sure these are lined up really, really well. which they are, but they're a little bit it's a little bit loose. So, I'm going to tighten it up a tiny bit. I could take it back to the ring bender, but I'm just going to go ahead and use these bow benders. These are awesome little tools to kind of tighten things up. Just squeeze a tiny bit as you go around and it'll tighten it up there. Perfect. Throw that in the pickle and then we'll solder it together. [Music] Should be good enough to clean everything up. First thing I'm going to do is cover it with uh this stuff called I think it's called Smart Flux. And what that does I need to make bigger tip. You know what? Let's go with a big big tip. Where's that rose bud? There we go. I use this for super heavy super heavy rings. I use a big old rose bud tip. Um the smart flux and it's from Pepe. Pepe tools. I get most of my chemicals and stuff from Pepe. Um it'll coat the surface so you don't get fire scale on your silver, which is super important. It's terrible whenever you get done with the ring and then you're going to polish. You see the big dark spots on it. And that's just from fire scale. fire scale creates those dark spots. So, this will prevent that. So, coat the whole thing in that first to give it that protective that protective layer. [Music] I don't like putting my solder in there until I see that. I knew that was going to happen. [Music] It was just an easier camera angle, but it's not going to happen. Try it like that. That might work. I forgot what I was saying there. Oh, yeah. I wait until that handy flux kind of goes clear and I think the ring is almost ready for the solder to start melting before I really throw the solder in there. I don't want the solder to get oxidized while I'm getting it ready. This is about ready now. And I use a ton of silver solder usually. Like if I'm doing gold, I use just barely enough to close the joint. But when I'm doing silver, you know, I just like to have plenty of solder in there to flow exactly where I want to. It's kind of wasteful. [Music] It's just not nearly as expensive. [Music] And as you get close to the final temperature of the ring where you think the solder's about to melt, then you'll just focus on the joint. But I'm not quite there yet. We're pretty close though. [Music] It goes All right, it's out of the pickle. So now what we need to do is just round it. Round it up and clean up the inside. Before we start rounding it up though, and where we're going to do that is put it on here and hammer it. You really got to make sure there's this is a smooth surface right in there where we did the seam because it'll make a bump on the outside of your ring if you don't. So, that's what we'll do first is clean up the inside, get it mostly cleaned, and then we'll round it up and finish it. All right. So once we got that smoothed out, I'm just going to continue to do a little bit of finer smoothing with oop with the sanding sticks. And okay, if anyone knows the answer to this, please let me know. So these are the sanding sticks that are like the really good ones. They like hold up extremely well. They're extremely durable. I don't know where to get these anymore. Everywhere I order sanding sticks from now are these really awful ones that just fall apart. They're horrible. So, I've been just using my old sanding sticks and just covering it with new sandpaper. But, um, boy, I'd like to find those again. If anyone knows, let me know. But, I'm just working my way down in grit until it's pretty pretty nice. You know, you want to be nice and smooth, no scratches. All right, cool. Let's go size it down. Now we have this completed. It's to the right size and everything. And we can start working on making this spinner. And the way I do that is I'll cut it out in a rough way. I'm going to try getting a big of hole as I can to get as close to that detail as I can. And I'll start making that coin ring. And then I'll basically make it the size about the same size as the outside diameter of this. So as I'm making it, I'll just put it up against there and check it. Check it. And I'm going to use mainly the Swedish the Swedish wrap method to do this. So I have a straight walled as I can side. So that's what we're going to start doing. I'll cut it the other way. It's a little easier to spin around. Gosh, that's a hardy thick coin. That's kind of neat. [Music] That will work. That'll work. You know what's crazy is I don't know why I haven't thought about making a spinner ring with this before. I don't think I've done it before, but this is like perfect for a spinner ring. Well, it's a little bit wide, honestly. It's a little wide for a spinner ring, but I think if you're not using a coin, it'd be pretty easy to do. If you're using a coin, it'd be a little more difficult. Just don't have as much room. All right. And we don't have to worry about switching to the composite cone here cuz we're just going to tear the entire inside of this ring out. So, okay. All right. Do my standard 25 wraps and we'll start Swedish wrapping it down to size. Not having a silver coin, they get stiff really, really quick. That's pretty close. Let's turn it around and see if I can't make it match. Actually, let's check it to make sure this back side. Yeah, still too big. It's good just to check to see how far you made it. I think I'm going to take it out of there and reanneal. It's super stiff. Time to keep going down. [Music] So these marks on here, I make these. This one is to signify the bottom as far as I can go without the a Morgan dollar going through the bottom of this guy. So I'm going to probably keep pretty close to that. This is pretty similar to a Morgan dollar. Go a tiny bit more. I think that's it. It's time to switch to a smaller Swedish wrapped eye now. [Music] Then we'll go back to a brass plunger. Always start with brass plunger until you can't push the bot, you know, push it through anymore with the first one. I don't think we're going to go very far, though. I don't think we need to go crazy far. Keep an eye on it here. We'll just check as we go. It's pretty close, but it's still a little bit bigger. I can always adjust it if it's not perfect after the fact, but it's good to get it really close. [Music] Okay, that's probably it. [Music] Yeah, that's it. That's it. I can feel the transition there and it feels pretty close. So, now I'm going to turn it around and go the exact same depth. [Music] So, I stopped this one when I was plunging it the other way at about two and a half witness lines from being completely down. So, I'm going to match it here. Now, we get a nice even ring [Music] about there. About there. Cool. In order in order to get this guy, this side cut off, you know, I used to just grind that off and that takes forever. So, what I started doing a while ago is just cutting it off with my with my saw. So, I'm going to be using this graver's ball again with this ring holder, inside ring holder. Setting it on there. Making sure I don't really want to cut my uh ring holder. So, I'm going to try keeping it away from it. Tighten it down. Then I'll just start running around and cutting it. I'll start by cutting a line around the entire thing just so I have a guide. [Music] [Music] There we go. [Music] These ends are always kind of interesting. Like, I don't know what I would do with that. For some reason, I can't throw it away. All right, back to sanding and smoothing these edges now. [Music] Okay, this guy is done and shaped. And one thing I forgot to mention when I'm sanding this and going around it in this stage, you want to make sure this thing is pretty much the same width all the way across. You'd be surprised how much it can vary. So my millimeter gauge, this will go around. And I mean, it's pretty close, right? It's within a couple hundreds. I'm pretty happy with that. So that'll work. You don't want a spinner being fat and thin. when you cut your channel forward, it'll get stuck in there or it'll be excessively large channel as just rattling it around. You kind of don't want you don't want either. I mean, you don't want it to be too tight either because then it gets stuck, you know, even if it's perfectly the same. You you want to have a little bit of a tolerance in there. So, all right. Anyway, this is way too thick, though. So, we're going to cut this thing down to be about a millimeter, millimeter and a half thick at the most. And the way I do that is with this guy. It's just a big cylinder bur. It's meant for wax. They have them in metal. I'm pretty sure they have metal versions of these, but this wax one I got from Rio for wax and it was just super aggressive. And um I still use it for wax, but I also use it for cutting the inside of this type of stuff out. Um you know, maybe I'll make it less aggressive eventually, but um that's what I use. It seems to work really good. All right, we got it like that. It's a little bit over a millimeter, so it's pretty rough. So, we're going to go ahead and use a barrel sander just to smooth everything out nice. And then with brass like this, I think it's brass. It's pretty soft, so we don't even have to worry too much. which I'm going to go straight to the polishing wheel after that and get all the scratches and everything out of it. So that way, you know, it rides smooth when it's spinning. You want to make sure it's pretty smooth on the inside. [Music] Right. This here is where the process can go sideways. So, what we're going to do is we're going to cut ourselves a channel in this. But the problem here, sometimes these rings don't spin perfectly true in the lathe. You know, coin rings, you know, I very rarely do this where I'm making a regular ring and then turning on the lathe. So, with this, I have a lot more freedom as far as to make sure the whole thing is plum to start with. Um, coins are not perfectly round. You would think they're going to be perfectly round, but they're they're definitely not. And so when you make a ring out of it, it tends to uh It's turning pretty good, actually. Except for this has a wobble to it for some reason. Let me check it again. I think it's the actual piece that's a problem. Let's try a different one. That's a no no, huh? I know lathe people freak out when you do that. Don't leave your thing in the chuck. I really need a new set of ring holders. These ones I've had for a very long time. [Music] Think that's okay. Okay. I forgot what I was saying. Oh, yeah. With coin rings, they're not perfectly round. So then when you make a ring out of them, then that accentuates the not roundness a little bit. Then you put on a lathe and then you can really see it wobbling around. So, you have to be very careful um when you're setting one of those up. All right, I think we're good here. We're going to start cutting. First thing I'm going to do is make a pass across the top just to smooth everything out. And then we'll start cutting our channel. [Applause] [Applause] That's going to be close enough. So, cuz we're going to end up sanding it. That little tiny divot right there, that'll go away in sanding. I really am being careful not to take too much away because I want to make sure I have beneath the channel we're cutting. I'd like to have, you know, at least a millimeter of metal. So, what I like to do with this is I'll snug this thing up to where that is touching. And okay, truth be told, I don't I don't do inches like this. So, I don't know how to to read the inches because I'm so used to doing everything in millimeters. But, I will set this to zero. And generally when I'm doing a coin ring, I will cut all the way back to zero again. I think I'm going to cut this one a little bit less, maybe to the 30 mark. And so that'll gauge my depth. I've done that since the beginning. And that has really helped me to make sure I don't overcut. I've never overcut one. So because of that. Okay, I'll cut halfway [Applause] and then get my spacing figured out. So, I'll cut it both ways. Make it even. And look at that. I lied. I cut the exact same depth as I do a a Morgan dollar. Okay, so now we have it like that. We need to take this guy off. And then we're going to switch out this for straight sided ones. I can cut that edge really nice and tight. And I don't have as many of these as I would like. So I always take this one out and replace it with this guy. And so we're just going to cut that that angle that's in there and straighten it out. Everything fits and we're ready to clean this channel up. And what I usually do is I'll cut these little tiny strips of sandpaper and just hold them in there and clean it as we go. All right, we're about ready to start fitting this onto the to the base. But one thing I like to do before I do that, just in case those walls of the the base aren't perfectly perpendicular, I like to just take a deburring tool and debur those edges a little bit. Gives us a little bit more grace around the edges. So that's not what's causing it to stick if it starts to stick for some reason. Now, what we're going to do is make sure this will actually fit and spin on this when we go to put it there. So, in order to do that, I take my calipers and I put it in the channel like that to where it'll spin freely. Then lock it. So, it spins freely in there. It's tight, but it spins freely. We'll pull that out. We'll take this and put it on this side to see if it'll spin with a little bit of gap in there. Right now, it doesn't. So, since it doesn't, it needs to go up a tiny bit. And we'll just throw on the ring stretcher until it does. I think that'll be perfect. Okay, we're going to compress this side down until it allows this to slip over. I know in previous spinner ring videos, people are like, "Why don't you put this one in the freezer and heat this one up?" And then, dude, you'd have to move this so far to make that work. And that's not going to move it nearly far enough, you know? These are like the same diameter almost, you know? else you'd have to move it 2 mm, 2 and 1/2 mm maybe, maybe even three to get it to go over there. You're not doing that with the freezer or heating. Just not going to happen. So, we're going to come over here and crush one side. And hopefully that wall is strong enough to hold up. We're going to find out. almost. All right, we're on. Oh, okay. Now, we'll stretch this back up. And then hopefully this didn't deform in here because it's too thin or something. And then once we spread it, hopefully it'll spin. I did stretch it. It didn't deform. And it is perfect. I just didn't get it on camera. I thought I was getting it on camera, but it's got the exact amount of tolerance both ways. It's fantastic. So now all we need to do is clean up any scratches that might have been created by squishing it in the ring stretcher. And so we we'll polish those all up, put a little bit of a comfort fit on the inside, and we'll be good to go. Boy, am I just being picky? There is a very small hole here and I don't like it. So, what we're going to do is there's something called a pit beater. And here's what it is. Um, this is just a dead burr that I bent and then kind of just filed a half dome in it and polished it. And so, what we'll do in order to get if you have a pit, even if it's a little bit bigger of a pit where you could actually see it easily, this one's pretty tiny. Um, put it in your flex shaft. And now you just very lightly go over that pit and you'll just basically push the metal into it and compress it and then get rid of it. Let's see if I can't find it again now. It must be on the other side. Yeah, there it is. Oh, next time I have a bigger one, I'll make sure to show this because this is pretty important to This is a handy thing to know. All right, now that pit is totally gone, but it leaves a little bit of a divot, but at least it's not a pit anymore. So, we can get rid of the divot now. Yeah, those kind of little tricks and tips are like super valuable, especially if you're working on a really nice piece, like a really nice wedding ring. It's platinum or gold or something. You can't and it's got tight tolerances. You can't just keep filing and filing until you get rid of the pit. You have to address it in some way. It's a really quick and easy way to do it. There's two more little teeny tiny ones in a different spot. Well, I already got this. So, there's that one. It probably wouldn't even show up in pictures that they're so small, but they're gone now. So, now I'm going to take this white wheel and I'm going to just 45 that just round that that sharp lip in there a little bit. Just give it a little bit of a comfort fit. We don't want to go too crazy because we that needs to be So this is a shaping stone and you'll get a perfectly you know smooth and round or sharp whatever shape you want uh white wheel. If you don't it'll leave a bunch of just like waves in your silver. You don't want that. So now it's nice and smooth. and just rounding that edge off. Yeah, I don't want to go really crazy and give it a really super tougher fit because we have that channel that we cut in there and I don't want to weaken that the ring by cutting too much material out. So, we don't really need a ton taken out to make it comfortable, but we definitely need, you know, we need some. So, now I'll switch to a gray wheel, which is just a little bit finer. Yeah, shaping stones are super handy. like you have little tight areas you need to get into, you can make this a really small little tight knife edge and you get into all kinds of places like that. So, I got my green rouge and my buff [Music] [Music] It's all polished up. And the final thing is to mark its purity. So I use a micro motor with a.3 mm. Oh, this isn't even that. That is a sticker. I have a carbide.3 mm bulber. Hard to do that while I'm looking at the camera. There we go. And I usually leave it out a tiny bit so I can get into the ring a little easier. So we'll mark it. This is coin silver. So it's 90% pure. So we'll put 900 on the inside. Oh, you're not going to be able to see this, are you? Yeah, my hands are going to be in the way. Oh, you got to take my word for it. It's a little tight for me. 11's a little small. Thanks for watching to the end of the video. If you wanted this ring, uh, give me a message to the website changewware.net. And also, if this isn't your size, I have a couple more of these coins left. So, Give me a