Specifics on How to Make a Small 1 oz Silver Eagle Coin Ring

Hey guys, Skylar here from Change You Can Wear and Sojourn Fine Jewelry. Today we're going to be going over step by step how to make a U.S. silver eagle, a one ounce U.S. silver eagle like this, into a small coin ring like a size eight. The first step for this guy is cutting a hole and with a one ounce silver eagle we use the biggest hole available to us which is a three quarter inch. Basically it's such a large coin and we really want to make it not unwieldy and miserable to wear so the more we can cut out of the middle of it the more comfortable it's going to become. We can go crazy obviously and cut out a ton but this is keeping as much detail as possible too. There's a balance that we're trying to strike there. So three quarter inch is where I draw it. I'll hold this tight so it doesn't unscrew and give it a couple smacks. There we go. So now we have it like this. We got a three quarter inch hole cut. We have really sharp edges here and in order to avoid this thing splitting we're going to 45 those edges with a deburring tool. This requires good pressure and just good even pressure as you go around. If you do too light, you hear that? That is the sound of chatter starting. You don't want that. It'll just get worse and worse so good pressure. You want a smooth clean slice. Once you've got that done come through with some I don't know 220 grit sandpaper something like that and we're just going to make sure there's no sharp edges. If there's any chatter that did show up this will get rid of it because all those can create they can create splits. We definitely don't want that. Look at this thing together. So you can see now that it's been 45ed and that will be a split free coin now. Size eight is a long ways to take this metal fold it and squish it down. So we're going to have to anneal it very lightly when it comes to pure silver coins. Not annealing is the best is the best thing you can do but since we're going to be moving this so very much we want to lightly anneal it. The danger here is if you kneel it too much the metal gets too easy to bend and the whole surface will ripple as you start to fold it. It's crazy. Pure metal does that. Pure gold really does it. Pure silver is kind of you can pay attention to that. So I didn't hardly heat this thing up enough. The way I check it is just by hearing if it sizzles or not. It's sizzled almost sizzled too much. You want it to be pretty light. So basically if you over anneal it it ripples right. If you under anneal it it'll start to bend and fold in goofy ways. Both of those things are both of those things are terrible. So we're trying to just thread the needle there and lightly anneal it to where it still bends easy but it doesn't bend so easy that the whole surface will ripple. Now we have a 17 degree die. These are all Jason's works tools. Those are the only ones I recommend. Everything else I've seen you know is hit or miss. So take that for what it's worth. So we have a 17 degree die. We're putting this face side down because we want the head side facing out. And there's two ways you can do it. You can take one of these universal steel folding cones and wrap it with teflon which is what I'm going to be doing. Or you can start it with this and then finish it with one of these folding cones. The composite folding cones. I on softer coins like this I tend to use the wrapped stainless steel one. I think it's the safest option. But you do what you want to do for sure. Everyone does something slightly different. That's how I choose to do it. All right we'll set that in there. And we're going to press this thing halfway down and then we're going to re-anneal. Well we'll see. If it's really easy to bend we'll just do it all in one motion. We'll go halfway clean the cut edge just to make sure there's no splits. And then we'll continue if it's really soft. If it's not well oh yeah it's pretty soft. So we're going to do this all in one motion here. We'll check it halfway through though. See the problem is when I'm talking I'm paying attention on the video. I'm not paying attention to the annealing which is dangerous. Let's take a look at the surface though. It's not rippling so we'll be okay. But just a quick sanding just to make sure that there's any cracks forming. We stop them before we keep folding. We'll continue pressing down evenly. All right we're all the way down. So the inside detail is being perfectly preserved because we wrapped it like that. And there's no splits and the detail is not rippled. So we're we got a good start here. So what we're going to do now is we are going to wrap it with Teflon. I'm going to avoid doing another annealing. So if I can avoid annealing if it's still relatively soft. I'm just going to skip annealing so that way we can avoid any rippling that might happen. We will re-wrap this thing. We're going to do 25 wraps. Okay you can see back here I keep my Swedish Wrap kits. And this is the Bell kit here too. The Bell kit actually comes with this extra big Swedish Wrap. The biggest Swedish Wrap kit that they have. I think they sell this separately as well because this will not fit in this one right off the bat. So we'll start with this massive one. I'll throw that in there. And we're basically going to press this thing down until it touches this bottom plate here. Whatever you're using for a bottom plate. I got this one from King's Coin Ring Tools. He's been retired for a while. You have to figure out your own base plate I guess. So I'm turning it every time. Pressing a little more. Turning it and then turning this. So that way we don't get the top of our ring with goofy lines and stuff in it. Which is what you can get. All right so we've made it that far down. We're going to pull this out of there. We're not going to take this Teflon tape off. We're just going to wrap right over the top of it. I think another 10 will be fine. And what I'm trying to do is preserve this when we go to press it on in the next Swedish Wrap die. And I'm trying to get a little bit more over the top too. I'm trying to preserve the reeded edge there. We're going to go straight into these bigger ones here now. Center this thing really nicely. If you don't have it on center it's going to slide into your coin and destroy it. So you don't want to cut corners here for time. That's really good. Now we'll press this thing down until it stops. Okay. Everything's still looking good. It's always good to check to make sure. Sometimes a corner will start going down farther than the rest of it. It'll create like this weird taco effect. None of that's happening. That's important. Now we'll continue down with this guy. And I have marked this pusher to where this line represents where this coin will get to the bottom and not go through the bottom. We want to get it right to the bottom. I suppose if you wanted to you could just press it against here to where it's not going to go through a hole. It'll just hit the bottom of your plate. That's where you stop. That's actually a really good idea. I just make a mark on my pusher so I know. All right. We're going to do the same thing. We'll push a little bit. Turn this. Turn that a little bit. The reason I'm turning this is because my press is not perfectly plumb. And the reason I'm turning this is if you just keep pressing and pressing and pressing these things start to squish together and they're going to create a little divot on the top of your coin ring which you definitely don't want. So I hope that kind of explains it. Press a little bit. Turn. Press a little bit. Turn. Continue all the way down like that. Okay. We're there. Just at the bottom. Exactly what I was hoping for. No weird things going on. That's good times. Okay. So now we're here. The weird thing is when you're making a size 8 this is where things really start to go sideways. We've got to continue down to this guy. Starts getting scary. Bad stuff starts happening when you start putting a lot of pressure on a big coin ring like this. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this off. Everything looks great still. That's exactly what we want. So I'm going to do another slight annealing. So that way we have less pressure as we're pushing down into this next one. And hopefully everything stays exactly like this. And just a really light fluffy flame. You don't want anything aggressive. You hear this? You don't want that. Something really light. Really non-aggressive. And if it starts changing colors you've went way too far. So just extremely... That's plenty. And I can pretty much assure you that that's going to just sizzle it. Just sizzle the water. Just like that. Perfect. So now that is like, I don't know, half annealed or something. Now we will re-wrap with our Teflon tape. Another 25 wraps again. You could save money on Teflon and not wrap it that many times. But I mean the coin's worth way more than this Teflon tape is. So be the judge of that. All right, coin edge facing up again. Here is our plunger. And for a size 8 we're going to plunge this and down until it bottoms out. And that's as far as I'll take one of these guys. I mean I could go farther. Then you start moving into needing the next size down plunger. And that's where damage really starts to happen. I kind of don't like to do that. That's why I stop it at a size 8. Okay, down we go. Look at that. No wrinkling whatsoever. It's perfect. All right, so now we'll do another really light annealing. Just because we did move the metal an awful lot. But you don't want to go crazy, especially here. Because you want to leave some of that hardness on when the ring is finished. If we made this thing, you know, dead soft, this ring would get worn out really, really quickly when someone starts to wear it. So what we're going to do is barely anneal it. And when we move, we're going to stretch it still. We're going to size it still. That's all going to harden it back again. All right, so we'll take some plastic. And just put it between the coin and the ring stretcher. Just saving that inside detail even more. And then we'll slowly stretch it. And this is going to be three times larger than our target size. We're making a size 8. We need to stretch this to a size 11. So let's stop it right there and just check it. That's a size 10 currently. So we got a little bit farther to go. Back to our 17 degree die. We're going to bring this down to our target size. Which is a size 8 in this 17 degree die. And all this is work hardening it, which is exactly what we want. We want it to be as stiff as possible when we're done. All right, there we go. That's a size 8 now. And now we're going to size it down one size below our target size. And we're going to use a 25 degree folding die for that. This is just going to curl it in more aggressively. That's why we're doing it. Just to give it that fat tire look. It goes faster, so you gotta be a little more careful. Look at that. Just below a size 7. All right, so now what we're going to do, we've sized that. We're going to turn this thing around and then make this curvature match on this side. Make it look really good on the outside of the band. Now we got something perfect. So now if you look inside of here, it's incredibly sharp edge in there. So we're going to take our deburring tool and cut that extra material out. And then we'll bring it back up to our size 8 by doing that. And then we'll finish it with a little bit of sandpaper to smooth it all out really good. Then we'll be ready for the antiquing process. So here's the thing. If you start to feel that chattering in there, where you start to feel it like... You really want to stop, sand it with some sandpaper, and smooth it back out before you continue with this. Or it's just going to continue to get worse and worse and worse. Much, much, much better. Let's antique this thing. We'll clean it first and then we'll antique it. Also, one thing I forgot to mention. We also need to deburr this side too. So be really careful. Just get any sharp edge that might be there. Get it removed and then we'll sand this when we're done as well. All right, in this coffee cup is some just below boiling jeweler's pickle. We're going to throw that in there. There's a lot of jeweler's pickles out there. I use Smart Pickle. Pepe Tools sells it. So that's what I would recommend. It's worked for years for me. So usually I have it in like a microwavable safe or baking safe Pyrex. And over the years, I have finally broken it. So I just wish for a coffee cup for now until I go get a new one. Coffee cup's not the best thing. It doesn't seal. So anyway, we're gonna leave that in there for a couple minutes. And while we're waiting for that to clean and clean the surface, get ready for the antiquing process, we are going to heat up some water. Our water for our liver of sulfur is in the microwave. And while that's happening, we're going to pull this out of our pickle. Rinse it off and then do not touch it. And we're just going to give it a quick wipe down with a clean paper towel. If you have access to like a running sink, in my shop, I just haven't put one yet. I would just wash it with Dawn dish soap really, really well. And then hang it, let it dry. You don't even need to let it dry, but just make sure there's nothing on it like Dawn. There's no leftover Dawn or anything on it. But this works really well too. Just don't touch it. That's the key. You don't want any oils on it. So we're gonna leave that on the paper towel right there. All right, so here's our water. Just came out of the microwave. It was in there for a minute and a half. So it's really hot. Throw some of this liver of sulfur gel in there. Make sure it's all mixed in. We're gonna dunk this in there. And you don't want to leave it in there crazy long. Especially with pure silver, it starts getting this weird splotchy effect. We're gonna leave it in there, I don't know, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. Just under a minute, something like that. Pull it out of there. We're going to rinse it off again. Dry it off with our towel. So now we have it nice and antiqued. And we have our 4-0 steel wool. This is important. You really want to just very lightly let it rub some of that antique off the surface. The heavier you do it, the more your antiquing doesn't pop. So you want it to be really, really light, slow and deliberate. And then I'll do the coin edge. Do that a little more aggressively. You want that to be really clean. We'll do the cut side. Okay, and then finally we'll take the outside and just ever so lightly work our way around. From here, we'll take a disposable jewelry rag. And these are the ones I like to use. I'll show you here. Connoisseurs, jewelry wipes. You can get these online, you can get them at Walmart. All the jewelry supply houses tend to have them. But they work the best for coin rings. And we're just going to polish it up. The real, you can lose this process really quickly if you over-anneal it or under-anneal it. So that is the part that kind of takes a little finesse and a little learning on how to do. That's the part that's easiest to go sideways. There's a lot of ways a coin ring can go sideways, obviously. But that is the one that I've discovered is the easiest to go sideways. So hopefully that helps. Smaller sizes are not easy to do. So, you know, take your time. And it's going to be a lot of trial and error to get them to come out really nice. But they are definitely possible to do. All right, guys. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one.