Making a Wedding Ring from a Wheelchair?! – Titanium & Gold!

i love it i think it's super unique and i thought when i first started dating that my wheelchair would detour people from dating me i never thought it would be something someone would want to put in their wedding ring [Music] today we're going to do something a little bit different i get married in a couple days and instead of going out and buying a generic wedding ring i'm gonna make something that's a little bit more personal cambrie my fiance got hurt in a horse riding accident about 15 years ago and this is her very first wheelchair made out of titanium i'm going to take a strip of that titanium inlay it in this 14 karat gold and make a ring that has more of a story more of a connection for me and her let's get started [Music] [Applause] [Music] so obviously a solid strip of gold is nowhere near ring-ready i can't just plop this on my fingers and be ready to go it takes a lot of steps and special skills to be able to get it to that point luckily one of my good friends for the last five years knows quite a bit about making rings and the first thing we need to do is anneal this metal which is basically softening it so that we can start working with it [Applause] so when you get flat stock like this gold it comes from the factory pretty hard because the way they extrude it and the way that they process it so heating it up with a torch disperses those molecules and makes it soft again and makes it more workable heating it up also makes the gold black which takes away the shininess for now but we'll fix that later [Music] next we'll take a jeweler saw with a very fine metal cutting blade and cut through each end of the ring so that the tips will line up and we can bring it to size okay so we've got it all pretty much lined up we've got a little bit of a lip on the on the top side that's sticking out but we need to take a file and file that down anyway solder won't bond a dirty metal so we need to remove this top layer of black oxidation so we can get a really strong bond with the gold the reason that we have to line the ends up is because solder isn't like welding where where welding fills gaps in welding if you've got a little bit of a gap this is the ends of the metal you can fill that gap with with weld but with solder you have to have all the metal touching because if it's like this and only a single point is touching only that single point is going to bond the solder is basically just like a glue solder is an alloy of gold and other metals that has a lower melting point than the actual gold ring itself so when we solder this together we need to use flux and flux is an anti-oxidation agent and so it keeps the metal clean so you can get a really clean bond with the solder hey oh win anyway more than anything i'm just trying to see if the solder really made a good connection with the gold so that looks pretty good pretty happy with that so we want the ring to be divided up evenly into thirds with an equal amount of gold on either side of the titanium centerpiece so we're using the caliper set to two and two thirds to create a dividing line between each of the segments so we can use the lathe to cut out the center i'm just going to start moving this forward so we have been saving the scraps of gold from the lathe because this can be melted down and reused later so this is cambria's very first wheelchair that she got 15 years ago it's made of titanium and the reason is made of titanium and not something like steel is because titanium is 40 lighter than steel while still being as strong as steel the reason wheel chairs need to be so light is that the people in them are usually constantly moving around and transporting themselves and the chair at the same time and the more the chair weighs the harder it is to move so we're going to take a piece of this chair and inlay it into a gold ring another cool thing with titanium is that it's bio-compatible meaning that titanium can be used inside of your body whether it's for like screws or rods and it's also non-magnetic which means that if you get an mri it's not going to mess with the titanium inside of your body because of all the cool properties and the high strength to weight ratio titanium is quite a bit more expensive than say steel but because of how lightweight it is it's totally worth it cambrie's upgraded her wheelchair several times since this first one so she won't mind if we take a little sliver [Music] we're going to put this into the lathe get this squared away really nice and then we're gonna take this and cut off the two millimeter slice that we need to inlay it into the ring so right now we're measuring the distance inside of the groove of the 14 karat gold ring so we can take that measurement over to the titanium insert and mark it along the edge of the ring so we can cut it off in the right size [Laughter] so now we have the gold that we've been working on before and the titanium insert which is extremely lightweight and even though it's made of metal it's about the weight of a toothpick which is crazy lucky for us the diameter of the wheelchair is almost the same diameter of the ring with a little fancy metal manipulation westin should be able to get it to fit around the outside all right show us how it's done to avoid cutting the titanium we're going to shrink one side of this ring and slide the titanium over top and then expand it back out and the way we're going to do that is with this ring resizer and these little holes are cone-shaped so as you push the ring down it forces the ring to fold in on itself once it's shrunk enough we're going to slide the titanium over the top into the groove and expand it back out on the ring stretcher so we've been compressing one side of the ring and now it's just small enough to allow the titanium insert to cross over so now the titanium insert is on the ring you can see one side is much more compressed than the other side that's because of the ring smasher so now we're gonna put it back in the ring stretcher and bring it back so it looks like uh it was before so after each couple passes with the ring stretcher we go back to annealing it to soften the gold to make sure it doesn't crack on us then it goes back on the ring stretcher and then back to annealing and repeat the process probably 20 times the black oxidation over the gold and the titanium should come off after we're done polishing it when it's all formed again these titanium shavings are so light it's like basically holding air or like styrofoam it's kind of like metallic cotton candy now both sides have been equally stretched it's uniform titanium's in the center now we just need to size it i'm a size 10 and right now this is about a size nine so after a lot of sanding with the flex shaft rotary tool we finally have the ring to size now it is time to clean it up and level out the top [Music] so we've laid down the titanium centerpiece and now we just have the gold we're going to sand off the oxidation and leave it with a brushed finish there you have it the ring is done 14 karat brushed gold with the titanium inlay westin on a scale of one to ten how hard of a project was that i'd give it a solid nine maybe ten it's it was a lot harder than you know some of the other inlays i've done where it's like antler or turquoise some of these other softer things you know it was pretty difficult that's true titanium is like it's up there in the hardness scale and it's like it's super compact and brittle i guess we had to be careful when we were like bringing it down but i think it turned out pretty sweet it pays to have friends with skills if you want to see some more projects that weston's done his instagram is roseannville you know mine zach's jerry rig it's crazy to think that this ring was once a part of cambrie's first chair so cambrie what do you think was it worth cutting off a sliver of your old chair yep i love it i think it's super unique and i thought when i first started dating that my wheelchair would detour people from dating me i never thought it would be something someone would want to put in their wedding ring and i love it i think it makes for a good story and it's something that was like a big part of your life a long time ago oh it's a big part of my life right now and well that particular chair we're already gonna be married by the time you guys see this but one of our favorite wedding gifts was from the what's inside channel they gave us something super special they gave two classroom full of desks with our name on it to a school in kenya and as a result of that we fundraised over twenty thousand dollars to build an entire school in africa an entire school so i'm going to take cambrie to go see the desks that what's inside donated to the schools in africa and see the school that you guys paid for and the donations are not over yet we still have time to maybe i mean this is a stretch fund a second school in africa and even if we don't fund the school the money we'll use for like water storage or water filtration or books for the library every single penny is going to be used for the schools in africa so if you haven't seen it yet i'll leave a link for the what's inside family channel where they revealed our wedding present i'll put a link for that right here and down in the video description make sure you see it it made me cry so it's super special thanks so much for watching and we'll see you around