Montana Sapphires - How this ugly rock transforms into a work of ART!

Hey, Skyler here from Change You Can Wear and Sojourn Fine Jewelry. Do you guys remember a few weeks ago when we went to Montana and mined up some of our own Montana sapphires? Today we're turning one of those into a custom handmade ring. And I want to select this guy right here. It's a little on the bigger side because I want something that's going to be more than a carat when it's finished being cut. I'm using an Ultratech V5 machine and they're just a really precise machine if you guys want to get into stone cutting. That we need to do is get some wax and start to carve out a ring. And the first thing to do there is get the ring size right with this reamer. And then measure the stone and make sure we cut the ring blank a couple of millimeters larger than that. And now that we have that, we're going to start putting some of our specific dimensions on this ring wax. So the first thing I do is get the ring width figured out, which is going to be 1.8 millimeters and then start to mark the sides and the height of the top of the ring. Once you have everything marked and ready to go, start to cut out your outside dimension. And what I use for that is this matte wax trimmer and then bring it right to your line with a wax file. Once your outside shape is completed, mark the top of your ring and then we'll start to set our stone onto it with this sticky wax. And once we have it perfectly centered, we're going to outline it with a scribe. And now what you do is cut a hole right down the middle and start to make a seat for our stone. And ultimately what we're going to do is use some ball burrs and then a setting burr and then cut right to our line with a setting burr. And once we have that completed, we're going to take a scalpel and then cut along the lines really carefully to make a perfect hexagon seat. Set it in there and then melt it down into the seat with a Pepe Tools wax pen. And then I'm going to start cutting our bezel into a hexagon shape. Once we have that, start to mark the width of the actual ring and then we'll start taking our Bertha and grinding it out. And then we'll take our wax files and fine tune everything and get the angles just right. I like to get into hard to reach areas with these wolf tools. They're a really cool set of wax carving tools you can get. Now that we're finished, we're going to melt on a wax sprue and put it onto our base and get it ready to start investing. So we're going to mix up our investment, vacuum it to get all the air bubbles out. And once we've done that, we'll pour it into our mold and then vacuum it again just to make sure there's no air bubbles in there. And then we'll let it sit for about two hours. And once that's finished, we'll throw in the oven and it'll be ready to start casting in the morning. And for these single ring projects, I like to use a spin caster. I'm going to be doing an upcoming video on a spin caster versus a vacuum caster and even just pouring it straight into the mold without using any kind of a caster. So that way you guys can see the differences between the three. Once it comes out of the mold, we clean it up with a drum sander, a white wheel, a gray wheel, and then a buff. And once the inside's done, we'll take some sanding sticks and start to clean up the outside. And then what we need to do is take a flat graver and start cutting our seat out and cleaning it up. Once that's done, we'll take a 0.3 millimeter bulber and then cut little holes out so that way point of that hexagon stone has somewhere to go without getting crushed. And the way we set it is we take a hammer and a punch and basically fold the metal over. And once it's folded over, we'll sand it flat and then clean up the inside of our bezel with a flat graver. And then I'll be setting some diamonds down the sides of this ring. Now we'll take our beading tool and take our little prongs and bead them over the top of the stones. Give it a quick polish and a steam and we're finished. All right guys, this was a really fun project for me from start to finish, from mining the stone myself to cutting it and then designing and creating this amazing ring. And at the time of shooting this, it's actually available for sale. Go to my website, changeyoucanwear.net and check this thing out. This will be a really awesome special ring for someone to wear. All right guys, thanks for watching and I'll catch you on the next one. Bye.