Gold is an amazing medal. Hi, my name is Todd Alan and for the last 30 years I have had
the pleasure of working with gold In this video I am going to be taking two old
gold wedding bands and reshaping them into a brand new ring I can do this without melting
because gold is an incredibly malleable material Gold is so malleable you can
take a single ounce of gold and stretch it into a gold thread five miles
long. A single ounce of gold can be hammered into a 300 square foot sheet and then it can be
made thin enough that it's actually transparent I clearly remember my first gold rings I had borrowed money from a friend and invested in
my first batch of gold. I had made many mock-ups in silver but I was still so nervous and excited
as gold was so much more expensive than silver. At first it was so hard to work because I
knew very little about annealing and softening metals but after learning some new torch
skills I made my first six gold rings.
Thanks to my grandmother buying one I still have one of those original rings
in my historical collection today Annealing gold is a process I use where I heat
the gold with the torch almost to a melting point then quickly quench it in water cooling it
rapidly. This restores the metal to a maximum softness so it is no longer brittle and I can
shape it without breaking. As I work the gold it becomes hard again requiring me to repeat
the process as I continue to work the gold When I finally learned how to properly anneal I
couldn't believe how beautifully the metal worked I could see why the ancients fell in love with it I had worked silver and other metals for years
but compared to gold they almost felt clumsy with the right tools gold is like clay it
can be molded and shaped unlike any other metal Over the past 30 years i have made an estimated
18,000 gold rings I have learned the intricacies of how gold feels and how it bends and how it
flows and how it melts.
Even after all these years I still thoroughly enjoy my work and I'm
constantly discovering new ways to work with it So sit back and relax and
enjoy as I work the metal gold.
