How to make a spinner ring - (2 Different Styles)

So due to popular request, I'm going to show you how to make these two different styles of spinner rings, and let's get started on this because there's a lot of work that goes into these. So to start off, all we're going to need is an assortment of brass sheet metal, copper sheet metal, some brass and copper wire, and some twisted wire I made in one of my previous videos. If you like to see how to make the twisted metal that I did in the previous video, feel free to click the card at the top of this video or a link in the description. So first things first, I need to figure out the width I want my first ring to be, which I decided on about 20 millimeters. Basically I was trying to make it a larger ring, but I needed to make sure it doesn't go over my knuckle. Then I need to find the diameter of the ring. I'm going to do this by measuring my mandrel to a size 9. Once you have the diameter, you're going to take that and add the thickness of the metal that you're going to be using to make the ring, and then take both of those numbers once they're added together and multiply it by 3.14, and that will give you the total length you'll need to cut to make it exactly the right size. So I'll take both my measurements, the 20 millimeters and the length that I need, and scratch them both into my piece of sheet metal. So once we have everything in place, we can start cutting it out. I'm using a jeweler's saw with some pro-cut lubricant. You can also use beeswax if you want to for a lubricant for your blade. One thing I like to do is start with the smaller cuts and then move on to the longer cuts, but this is just personal preference. So once this is cut out, we're going to clean up the sides with a file to make sure it's not sharp and it doesn't have any of the pattern from the saw blade. So using the same sheet of metal, I'm going to cut another one out that is 10 millimeters wide instead of 20, and use the same process I just showed. So you're going to want to get good at making these circles, because rings are just fancy circles, and these rings just happen to be a bunch of fancy circles. So before we do anything else with these, we need to anneal them so they're workable so we can actually curve them around the mandrel. Once you have annealed both pieces, make sure to quench them, and then we're going to start shaping them around the mandrel. Mostly we just want to get the bottom curve and then hammer down the tops, and then we're going to flatten them out as flat as possible so we can solder them together. You might notice that the thicker of the two rings is a little bit harder to get lined up properly. If you use some patience and some non-marring pliers, you can bend it into shape. Also be very careful when hammering the pieces. As you can see, I put my thumb inside of the ring. If I hammer this too much, I could probably hurt my thumb pretty bad. And if you're wondering why we're making rings flat on one side, it's to make it so we can have a better solder joint, rather a stronger solder joint, when we do solder them together, and then we'll bend them back to being full circles. So once all that's done, I'm going to use a jeweler's saw and cut through the joint. This will make it so both sides are completely flush with one another, and this is really key to getting a good solder joint. You want everything to be as flush as possible so there's no gaps. So if you're ever soldering a ring and you're hammering it back onto the mandrel to make it round again and it splits, this could be your problem. So after all this, I'm going to need to pickle both the rings because the next step is to solder them. Once they're all clean, I'm going to add some flux to the joints on the top and bottom, and make sure it actually gets between the two pieces too, and then add some hard silver solder on the inside of the rings. If you use the same soldering method as I do, make sure to heat up the pieces slowly and keep an eye on where the solder chips are, because they like to bounce around and move. You want to keep them on the joint so when the solder does flow, it flows through it and not around it and all over the piece. After quenching these, I'm going to start forming them into the actual ring shapes on the mandrel. Since we just heated them, they should be annealed now, and easy enough to push on almost all the way, but you will need to use a rawhide mallet or if you want to texture them, you can use a texturing hammer. Just try not to hit them too hard because you'll start to thin the metal out and stretch it and the sizing will be off. Also try to keep in mind when using a mandrel and making rings that are kind of thick like these, that the mandrel has a taper to it, so you have to flip the rings around and make sure both sides are equal. And we're pretty much going to do the same thing for the other ring, just make sure that the whole thing is round all the way through and to flip the ring over so it doesn't get a taper into it. So I wanted to test fit one of the rings and it's a little snug and pretty much got stuck on my finger, so be careful with that. It just needs the inside to be polished out and it would slide off fine, but I had to use some dish soap and water to pull it off. But anyways, we're going to now file down the outside edges of these rings to make sure that they're uniform. If you textured yours, you really don't need to do this part because it'll take off all your texturing. So basically all I had to do was hammer this onto the mandrel just to the point where it gets stuck, so I can use my file on it way easier than holding it in my hand, and then in a curved motion go over the entire piece until it's uniform, because there's a lot of high and low points on both of these rings. As for the thicker ring, you're going to want to focus mostly on the bottom half and then flip it over and then do the top half that is now the bottom half, because if you put enough force on it, you can start bending the ring because of the taper of the mandrel, along with the ring being long enough for that to actually affect it. This process will also clean up your solder joint and make sure that it's completely flush with the ring. So to make the circles that are going to go around our thicker ring, we want to do the same math equation just using the diameter of the outside of the ring, and then the thickness of whatever we're going to be wrapping around it. Add those together and then multiply it by 3.14, and then you're going to want to add one to two millimeters on top of that to the total, and that will make it so your piece will float around it basically and not be bound, because we want to do these spinners and not just snug pieces of metal. As for the thinner of the two rings, I'm going to be using two bands on either side of the center band that are going to be locked in place with solder, and the center band will be spinning. So those need to basically match up with the outside diameter of the center shaft or center column ring. To do this, you just don't add anything extra and make it like you would a ring. The best wire to use for this to make sure everything's going to line up perfect is square wire, which I have none on hand that is the right size, so I'll be using two millimeter round wire. As for the centerpiece of this ring, it's going to be the twisted wire I made in a previous video. The basics of how I made this was I took two 16 gauge pieces of wire, one copper and one brass, I put them into a drill and put the other end of them into a vise and pulled the trigger on the to twist them in place. Once that was done, I hammered everything down flat as even as I could, and that's basically how I made this piece. So after all that, here's all the wire I'm going to be using. Just keep in mind that you don't have to use these exact wires, you can use others and just be creative with it. So once I have all those pieces, I'm going to anneal everything besides the twisted wire. The reason why I'm not annealing the twisted wire is because I need to put some solder onto it so it all stays together when I bend it around to turn it into a ring and hammer it, and I don't want it to fall apart on me. So after annealing these pieces, I put them into the pickling solution for a while to clean them up so they're going to be ready for soldering, and I need to clean off their ends a little bit more before I can start forming them into rings, and I'll be doing this just by using a hand file. So we're going to do the same thing we did before, we're just going to take them and round them around the mandrel and then flatten one side, cut them, and then solder them. So when soldering the twisted wire, make sure to put flux all over it and then place a couple pieces of hard silver solder across the length of it. Then just try to evenly heat the whole piece until the solder flows, and make sure it flows between the two pieces of wire so everything is one piece. I accidentally had one piece off of the block a little bit and melted the brass wire, seeing that brass will melt sooner than the copper counterpart. Even with it melting a little bit, I'm not going to remake this piece because I want the larger ring to be more of an artistic feel to it, and I don't want it to be perfect looking. So I'm going to go with it and make it work and make it look nice. As for the rings, all you need to do is put some flux on the solder joint and put the piece of solder underneath the ring and set it on top of it, and make sure that it's as flat as possible so it can actually make contact with the ring, and when it flows it will go up through the joint and it should have an almost perfect solder joint. Once we're done soldering all these, we're going to use the mandrel to turn them all back into perfect circles. Also, we're going to use this time to test fit them onto the center parts of the ring to make sure everything is lining up and everything fits how they're supposed to. When it comes to the smaller of the two rings, you're going to want to make sure that the outer bands are pretty tight for the top and bottom, to the point where they can kind of stay where they're at without you holding them. If you let go, they kind of sit there and not fall directly down. If they do fall down, and if you can afford to stretch the inner ring a little bit to meet up with them, just put it back on the mandrel and hammer it a bit and bring it up in size just barely, and it should fix this problem. But if there's a lot of play between the outer bands and the main inner ring, you're going to want to cut through the solder joints of the outer bands and re-measure and shorten them a little bit, and then go through the entire process again of soldering them back together and reforming them and testing it. As for the larger ring, it's going to be a little more lenient because you just want them to be able to spin freely. So I'm just going to use some thin wire and tie everything together and put it inside the pickling solution so they don't get all mixed up, and take out the twisted wire from the pickling solution because we're going to turn those into rings now. So I'm going to have to figure out how to make this melted one look nice. It happens to be the same length because only one of the wires melted, so what I'm going to do is try to match up the other side and cut off a piece of wire and then solder them together. And I'm going to be using the same technique I did on all the rest of the rings throughout this video, which is just flux the pieces, put a piece of solder underneath the solder joints, and heat them until the solder flows, and try not to melt any more of this. After quenching both pieces I'm going to turn them back into their ring shapes, and I'm going to have to take a burr off of the one that I had to modify to make it look proper. And I'm just going to use hand files to do this. And then I'm going to clean them off with the pickling solution. So I'm going to use an 80 grit sanding wheel to clean off any of the solder or the little bits of copper that are all over these pieces. So I was going to clean this piece up completely and flatten both edges on the ring itself because it has two points on either side, but I decided it'd probably look a lot better if I cut round bits into the edges and then flared them outwards. So that's what I'm going to do using a round hand file. You could also use a round rotary tool to do this, but I thought of that after I decided to use the hand file. So now that that's all done, I need to use a rotary tool to cut back all the burrs that are left from the file, because now the ring is extremely sharp on the inside and it wouldn't be very comfortable to wear. This also gives me a chance to clean up any solder inside of the ring, and to clean up the solder joint to blint it with the rest of the metal. So after adding a lot of detail I felt the outside of this was a little too plain, so I'm going to take a just straight file and scar up the entire outside. You can do this by using the edge of a file. You can also use a triangle file which would be a lot easier, but I believe I broke mine, so I have to deal with this. I'm also going to polish the inside of this ring because it'll be smooth on your finger and it'll be more comfortable than if it was rough. And then the outside I'm going to polish because I like the contrast between the scarring and a shiny finish, and this will also make it so I don't have to leave it in the tumbler as long. So after all that we can finally put this ring together and call it just about finished. All you really need to do is use a metal doming punch and hammer it down, and then I go up one size bigger just to get a little bit more flair to it, and then repeat on the other side and make sure all your rings are on it because once you do this you're not going to be able to get them on or off. So once all that's done you should be able to spin the rings around the outside of it with no problem or snags, and it should fit on your finger properly or onto the mandrel, wherever size you're making. And the only thing left to do is polish up the outer rings, which I'm going to do in a tumbler for about 8 to 12 hours. But before we do that we need to finish off our other ring, and we still have a lot of soldering to do on it. So we're going to start by putting flux on the outside part of the inner shaft of the ring, and then we're going to take one of the outer bands and place it on it, and make sure it goes all the way to the bottom as flat as possible, and it is also going to have flux on it. Then I'm going to place four pieces of medium solder around the ring where the two meet. With my torch I'm going to slowly heat up the entire piece until the solder flows and connects the two pieces. Once this is done, we're going to have to pickle it and then move on to the next step. So after pickling my piece and looking at it, I found out that the solder didn't flow properly, so I'm just going to put some more flux onto it and then reheat the piece, and this should fix that problem. If needed you can add more solder, and I'm going to have to re-pickle this again for the next step. So if you're using an acetylene torch and just turn on the flame part, you can blacken this piece so no solder will really stick to this, because we want it to be spinning freely. Or you can use liver of sulfur, or you can use jack's darkener, or you can even just heat the piece up and make it fire scaled and gross and don't pickle it so it has a less chance of stuff actually sticking to it. Another thing you can do if you don't want to do that is use a very thin piece of steel wire and tie it around over the spinning part of the ring, and then put your top piece on top of that, and the steel should separate it enough that you won't have any solder leaking from the top piece to the center. If you do happen to do that, make sure to take the steel wire off of the piece once you're done before you put it into your pickling solution, or you'll ruin your entire pickling solution along with everything else inside of it. So make sure to use flux on the top pieces, and then use easy or extra easy solder, because we want it to flow as quick as possible and be able to stop it as quick as possible. Once you take it out of the pickling solution, you should check the and make sure that the bands are secured properly and there's no gaps in the solder. If there is, go ahead and go back and add more solder and repeat this process again until everything is working properly. Also make sure that your center ring spins freely. If all the following checks out and you don't need to do anything, then we can move on to the next part of the process, which is cutting off the excess material from the center piece of the ring. I'm just going to use a jeweler and cut along the top band all the way across until basically that piece pops off. So we're just about done with this ring. All we need to do is clean up both sides of it using some 220 grit sandpaper, a rotary tool to clean up the inside of the band, and then we're going to hammer this onto the mandrel and trim off the excess on the bands so it's more flush and kind of squared so you can access the center spinning part easier. So all I need to do now is shave down the outer bands with this hand file and I need to do this in a curved motion so I don't get any flat spots. So once all that's cut down to my liking, I'm going to clean it up with some sandpaper along with a sanding disc and then quick polish and then throw this into the tumbler with the other ring. And after about 12 hours in the tumbler, here's the finished rings. Thank you for watching. If you like this video, leave a thumbs up, and if you have any questions or suggestions, leave a comment below. If you want to see future videos of mine, feel free to subscribe to my channel, and I've been getting out videos about once a week. Other than that, I hope this video helped you out, and I'll see you guys next time. Bye!