I have completed my first ever set of rings. I made 9 in total and only ruined one on the process. That reminded me of my old EverQuest days where as you start out with a poor skill in a trade you would ruin a lot of your raw materials. Anyway, I bought a ring mandrel and and some square sterling silver wire and got to work with the aid of YouTube and a some reading. With a set of ring sizers, I measured my victim, er em…girlfriend, and went to work. To figure out how long to cut the metal I just calculated the circumference by measuring the diameter of the correct sizing ring and cut a little larger, then filed to make a perfectly smooth end. Solder it and you have a rings you can make perfectly round on a mandrel. Really easy actually.
I made 5 rings with gemstones, and 4 that are plain. I figured that would allow the most versatility for changing it up. These are only about 1 mm thick and meant to be pretty dainty. I used pre-made bezel cups because making 4 mm bezels my hand didn’t sound fun. Since my stones were round there was no reason to do a custom bezel anyway. I hammered the rings with a steel ball-peen hammer to give them a texture. In doing so, it added about 0.25 of a size to the rings because the metal spread out a bit.