today I'm making a 14-karat gold ring
with the wooden inlay from this wooden ornament that is made from a piece of
wood that is over a hundred years old it's got a really cool story behind it
and I'll explain a little bit more as we go along so the first thing I need to do
is take my favorite knife this is an old stanley knife I got from an old neighbor
of mine and lightly shave off a thin layer of wood that I can use to inlay
into the ring the nice thing is this wood is already about the same width as
the inlay so I should be able just to shave off a tiny layer and still be able
to save the ornament so I'm just taking a brand new blade and lightly scraping
it along the wood to shave off just a tiny little layer and this only works
when you have a really really sharp blade and some wood that's not as easy
to do this just happened to work out perfectly now that I've got some of the
shavings you can see it's pretty close to the right width but it's too big so
I'm going to take a measurement of the size of the inlay and then I'm gonna use
this little caliper as a guide for trimming down those little shavings so
they'll fit perfectly in the inlay once I've got it trimmed up I'm gonna
take a little chunk and just make sure it fits in there perfectly and it's not
gonna be too hard to inlay and not too big or too small and then I'll trim the rest of these
little pieces I cut off so that I have enough that even if I screw some up I
have enough scraps that I can completely get around the entire ring and then I
mount it into my lathe so I've got a nice easy stable working position to
start in laying and I can use both my hands without having the hole without
having to hold the ring in one hand then try to inlay it so I'm just gonna put
down a thin layer of the CA glue and just try to tack this little piece on
there and then take the back of my blade and just roll it over and try to seal it
into place you've got about 10 seconds of working time with this this type of
glue when you if you put it on too early it's going to be too wet and too loose
if you put it on too late it's gonna be too tacky and you won't be able to
manipulate it so there's just about a two second window you have to get it
exactly where you want and get it tacked down and then later I can come in with
more glue and get all the high spots pushed down and secured to the gold
and then just layer it up as I go along so I'm basically just working my way
around the ring putting little chunks in where I can and trying my best to match
up the grain and make sure that it looks uniform and there's no big gaps or
anything and this is this is the hardest part about doing these style rings is
because you always end up with a little bit of super glue on your your blade and
then it sticks to your blade and it's moving around and right when you think
it's dry it lifts up and it's just kind of a pain but the effect is really
beautiful it's okay if it spills over onto the wood that's already inlaid
because that just helps glue it down but if it starts layering up on the un-inlaid areas just the the part that has just gold into it it would start
building up and not leave me enough room to inlay the wood into the ring because
I need this wood to lay down flat enough that I can build up enough of the CA
glue to create a protective layer so that you know if it gets wet or if it
starts if someone happens to rub it against a brick wall or something that
it's not going to wear down the finish to a point where the wood will start
pulling off of the ring and as I finish this up I'll give you a little
information about where this wood came from and why it was significant to
this couple so this is an email I got from the person that commissioned the
ring Hannah she said so my fiance's grandmother Zora and her family owned a
farm she had 11 kids and her husband died of ALS super-young so she really
held down the fort for years she passed away in 2011 and they had to have the
barn torn down years ago but one of his aunts saved a piece of wood from it and
made us those Christmas ornaments so I just think it's a really cool story
in a really unique way of saving some family history and giving his ring some
significance now I've got the majority of the inlay covered in the wood I'm
gonna take some more of the CA glue and start coating it building up that
protective layer so that there's a nice barrier between the world and the inlay
the world's a harsh place it's not four beautiful little rings now I've got
enough built up I'm going to put it back into the lathe and start it up and I'm
gonna start leveling off that thick layer of CA glue and make sure that I
really do have the inlay below the surface of the Ring and then I'm going
to come in afterwards and just keep layering it up so that I have at least a
millimeter maybe a millimeter and a half of the CA glue covering the wood I'm also using a file to help make sure
I got that perfectly straight and that the edges are nice and crisp because I
don't want there to be any areas around the corners of the inlay that that water
is going to be able to seep into so now I'm going to clean it up and try to get
off get out as much of that dust and those shavings as possible before I
start putting more CA glue on then I'm just going to do another flood coat and
let it dry and you can already see some of that really pretty aged wood grain
coming out through the finish we're putting on it and then do another coat then I'm gonna move my tool rest out of
the way and start sanding the finish because I want it to be really level and
if I keep adding glue on top of it without leveling it off I'm gonna get a
really ridgey looking ring so after each coat I try to level it off so that I get
a nice clean finish just want a ring like this I'll put on maybe 10 or 20
different coats and just keep sanding and leveling and feeling spots and
filling low spots and sanding high spots just until I get it perfect and now that
I've got the glue built up enough I'm going to take my flat tool and just
start level it off and try to get it as flat as possible and remove as many of
the little scratches that were caused by the sandpaper as possible then I'll move to a finer grit sandpaper
and then finally on to some polishing compound a lot of people like to use
different types of rouges and polishes for various things I've always really
liked this mother's polishing wax I think it's mostly for aluminum but it
works really really well with this type of finish now you can see that shine
finally starting to come out after a few layers of polish and now we're basically
done you can see that really high shine and it really brings out the depth in
that wood it shows enough of that old wood texture and it really shows the
history of the wood rather than just having a really clean piece of wood that
you can't tell is old it really shows that old texture and that weathering
that's it's in the wood and really represents how old this wood really is
and I'm really happy with how it turned out
