Hammered Gold Ring 18k

This is another hammered gold ring, this time in 18k

This is a picture I took in my photography studio utilizing some innovative lighting techniques.

Actually my photography studio is my cell phone and the ring is sitting on an envelope on my desk.  The flash hit the shiny gold and made a pretty flower shape.

Anyway....   In my travels I came across this ring:

Marked Hidalgo 750.  750 is the European marking for 18k gold.  18/24 = .75%

 I looked around the dang old internet and found this: 

 

AAHHHHWWWAHHH... so sweet.  Still a crummy design.

It does look a lot better in black.

 I tried to give the ring to my wife twice and she didn't like it.  So you know what that means:

melty-melty

here is one of the side bands melted

for comparison, the other ball is melted copper.  when carat gold is melted it looks like the one on the right

first I burned off the green enamel

9 grams of 18k gold is about $300 right now.  it is a little embarrassing to say how little I paid for this.....

beauty

The ingot still looks better in the box.  Sorry Hidalgo and Ashley or whatever.

I got distracted because the pathfinder I have been driving for 19 years turned 100k miles during lunch, so I had to pull over.

Happy 100k Pathy!

anyway, back to work.  This alloy rolled out very nicely with small effort

anneal and roll some more

this is it, on the right, shaped into a ring

ring - sort of.  ready to be fused back together with the torch.

I started hammering it on a stepped mandrel to avoid the tapered mandrel.  The tapered mandrel sort of causes everything to move out of shape in into a cone.

I used a bunch of different hammers.  the plastic headed one allows stretching without marking the ring very badly, the other ones are planishing hammers and if you move the ring a little bit after each strike you can get a nice pattern.

this is without even polishing the ring

casualty

 The hammer below has a near mirror surface and leaves that same smoothness on the surface of the metal (gold).  I use that one last.....

that is how it's done son