Making a Silver Eagle Coin Wedding Ring with a Gemstone

Skyler here from Change You Can Wear and Sojourn Fine Jewelry, and today we're gonna be making something interesting. We've got this one ounce Silver Eagle, and we're going to be making a custom wedding ring out of it, but we're gonna not just make a regular coin ring. We're going to be cleaning the inside out, making it like a fine piece of jewelry on the inside and polished, and then we're gonna be setting a aquamarine in the sun of the design. We're gonna be cutting it down to eight millimeters wide, so it's like a regular wedding band width. All right, so the first thing we need to do is cut this hole, and we usually use that for the entire process. That's the Jason Works Auto Punch, but the largest size they have is three quarters of an inch, something like that, and if we look at eight millimeters here, good indicator of eight millimeters, so that's significantly larger of a hole we need to cut in this, and really, once we get done Swedish wrapping it, that's gonna grow, because as you extrude it, the ring gets thicker, so we're probably gonna need it to be slightly smaller than that, so because of that, what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna cut the largest hole we can at that, and that gets our hole nice and centered, and then we're going to move to this guy. This is a Pepe Tools disc cutter. This thing's awesome in that it goes much, much larger, and we can center an item that has a hole in it. All right, so we're going to slide this thing into the seven-eighths hole, and these are the auto-centering things. You put it in there, and it centers the hole for you. Bring this thing down nice and tight. Now, everything's pinned in there now. We'll pull that out, take a quick look, make sure it actually does look centered, which it does. Now, we'll put our cutter, what do you even call that? Our cutter thing, very technical term. Put that in there, and then we will throw it into our six-ton A-frame press. You would definitely want hydraulic power when you're doing this, because hammering it would be near impossible. This is a lot of force that's put into this, so here's a good rule of thumb. This does not come bolted down to this, right? So every time I get a six-ton press, I drill a couple holes, put a couple bolts in there, because when you're pressing something this much force, I have had that come off of there, fly off of there, and that jack will hit you in the head. It's not fun. It's happened to me, I know it's happened to other people, and ever since then, a couple bolts is pretty cheap insurance. But anyway, what we're gonna be doing is once we get it snugged up like it is, I'm gonna crank it as fast as I can just to get that force to jam through there quickly and cleanly, because it is a lot of force. So here we go, here we go, moment of truth. Looks pretty good, all right, cool. And now we know it's a little bit larger than it needs to be, but that is gonna work. Now we'll clean it up. We have our deburring tool, our coin with sharp edges, and we're gonna 45 degree these edges with the deburring tool, carefully. What we're doing here is making sure this doesn't split when we start to stretch it and fold it. So any sharp edges need to go away. Use a little 240 grit sandpaper. With pure silver, I don't anneal, generally. Maybe at the very end I'll anneal when I'm slicing, but that's it, because it tends to ripple the surface. So we're gonna keep the surface looking really pretty by not annealing it. If you do feel the need to, just anneal it extremely lightly, that does help. 17 degree die, begin to fold this guy. Now we'll start Swedish wrapping it down to the correct size. For the longest time I used to put the Swedish chef in these videos, because I thought it was hilarious. And then I had a editor of mine one time tell me how annoying it was, and nobody thought it was funny. Well, I still find it funny, so for old time's sake, let's do some Swedish wrapping. Need to Swedish wrap this guy down to where it can be a size nine, right? And we need to make this ring probably around two millimeters thick to accommodate the stone we're putting in here. Size nine ring, as far as diameter, is going to be 18.9 millimeters in diameter. So, and we're gonna make this thing two millimeters thick, right? So 18.9, and then you're gonna add four millimeters to that measurement to figure out the outside dimensions. 22.9 is what we need to make it. So, right now we are at 33.23. So we need to go a long ways down. So we'll keep Swedish wrapping until we get that measurement here. And then once we do, we'll flip the ring around and make it match. So that way the outside's the right size, and then we'll clean the inside up to make it perfectly a size nine. We just Swedish wrapped it through the 1.0 by 1.4 die. This is what I usually use for Morgan Dollars. And the smallest side of this guy is 26.5. So, we still got a little ways yet to go. We'll go down to the next size down Swedish wrapped die. Go from there. We're down to the correct width, and we're shooting for eight millimeters wide. So we're gonna set this at eight. So right now it's like over 11. This thing grew a little bit more than I expected. So, if you look at eight, if we centered all on this side, the sun would be kind of cut in the middle, which I don't like. So I think we're going to do, where's the date, right there. So we're gonna take that rim off, and that'll pretty much center the sun. And we'll have all the detail that we want. So what we're gonna do, we'll cut this side down, get rid of that, and then take the rest of it off of this side. Damn that down now. And we got that all sanded, cut and sanded. The rim is totally gone now. It's really good. So what we're gonna do now is mark the other side. So we're gonna bring this back to eight millimeters again. Maybe just a tiny bit more, gives us a little bit of buffer room, just a little. And I'm just gonna mark this thing. I cut that and sand it just like we did this side. All right, check it out. We are perfectly at eight millimeters wide, and I made some marks on this thing at two millimeters. So I just traced the outside at two millimeters, and that is the piece that needs to go out. The other side's really tight, which is exactly what I was hoping. So that worked out good. So what we're gonna do now is cut that out, and we're gonna cut that out using Bertha. So Bertha is a big cylinder burr. This is actually, they have metal and wax versions of this on Rio's website, Rio Grande, Rio Grande, whatever. And this was marketed as a wax one. You know, it's pretty aggressive for wax, so I've been using it for metal to soften it down. Really hasn't changed much, to be honest. So I use it for both wax and metal, though. Just whenever I go to use it for wax, I make sure I sonic it and steam it, so that way I get any metal shavings out of it. You don't want to impregnate your wax with some random metal, and then you cast in a different metal, and you get a problem. So anyway, what we're gonna be doing is getting it to our lines. We got the inside all cleaned out to the right size with the sanding drum. And so now we're gonna go with a white wheel and then a gray wheel, and they're gonna get progressively finer as we go. And then finally, we'll go to a buff with some green rouge. We'll lick the stone. Set it down. Now that it's marked, we'll take our auto punch and put a divot right there. Perfect. Now let's drill it out. The very first thing we do when we're done drilling a hole, take it off and countersink it. Once we've got our hole drilled, it's all countersunk, we're gonna come through and get progressively larger with some ball burrs until we get close to the size we want it to be, and then we're gonna switch to setting burrs to finish it off and give it a nice seat. So if you set stones, I'd love to know, what's your favorite metal you like to set in? Really, no. For me, my favorite alloy is 22 karat. I love, love, love the way it looks. Setting stones in it is not my favorite, just because it is so gummy and soft still. Drills really good. It is hard, but not crazy, crazy hard, like white gold or something. This is the setting burr that's closest to its size. It's a little bit too small, and the next one up's a little bit too big, so what we're gonna have to do is slowly migrate it until it fits in there really well. We'll start by just drilling it straight down. It's close. Okay, now that guy is set in there perfectly. Everything's nice. We have some water heated up to just about boiling, a little bit below. A little bit of sulfur gel in there. And I have the ring freshly cleaned and out of the pickle. We'll throw it in. Let's see what happens. I like the way this one turned out quite a bit. I like the way most of them turned out quite a bit. Thanks for watching. Thanks for following along. If you want to order a ring, check out my website, changeyoucanwear.net. There's some that are ready-made there, and if you want something special, let me know.