Category Archives: personal

Open Source Wedding Rings (update 2)

Polishing rings with a dremel

Polishing rings with a dremel. This technique will quickly burn your fingers, and is not recommended.

On 2013-03-14, Suzette and I had been married 10 years. We had a 10th anniversary ceremony with Mr. Gerald Williams, who was the celebrant for our marriage/elopement 10 years earlier.

As I noted in previous posts, I’d designed wedding bands with OpenJsCad for the occasion, and had them cast in platinum (actually a 95/5 platinum/cobalt alloy). I ground off the sprues and polished them myself with a dremel.

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Open Source Rings (update 1)

Unfinished castings

Unfinished castings

The castings of my 10th anniversary wedding bands arrived today. I had them made by Techform Casting. They came out well.  As they advised me, there are small pads that they added for the casting process – presumably they are residual sprues, although the casting folks didn’t call them that.

I had a lot of angst about the size of the rings.   We measured our fingers with sizing rings, but they were narrow, and these rings are almost 10mm wide.  Also, the metal shrinks during casting, which either makes the ring smaller or larger, depending on who you believe.

My ring came out fine, but Zette’s came out too small.  I had tried to err on the small side, on the theory that it’s easier to stretch rings than to shrink them.

I plan to finish the rings myself, but I’m anxious about that too.  Tempting to just get a jeweler to do it, but then they wouldn’t be quite as personal.

Open Source Wedding Rings

[update 1][update 2]

I lost my wife’s wedding band a few years ago. She handed it to me while I was driving and asked me to take it to a jeweler to get it hammered back “in round”. Of course, I lost it immediately.

My original wedding band I still have, but it’s always been a little unsatisfying. My ring finger is thinner than hers, and the pattern never quite matched where the original jeweler sized it down.

So, for our 10-year anniversary, I’m making bespoke rings. And because I’m an Open Source guy, I had to do it with Open Source Software. And of course, the code for the rings will be open source too.

P1000693

My original wedding band

Code? For Wedding Rings?

canvas

digital model of 10th anniversary ring

 

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How much?

Q:
How much wood
would a woodchuck chuck,
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

A:
A lazy woodchuck, name of Buck,
tried to chuck, but had no luck.

A crazy woodchuck, name of George,
chucked four cords of knotty boards.