Silver Band Ring

This silver band ring project was designed to make us practice our soldering, sawing, and polishing techniques.  We all started with a strip of silver 10mm wide.  After hammering, bending, and soldering the silver strip into a simple band ring we had to divide the ring into equal sections and add our own designs to each piece.  The final challenge was to solder the equal pieces back into a single ring.  Sound difficult? It was!

After my first soldering attempt the solder hadn't completely filled to edge of the gap so I had to add more after cleaning off the layer of oxidization. 

It took me a whole hour to saw the band ring into 3 pieces of equal width because I was trying to keep the cuts as straight as possible. The extra time it took me to saw the band ring paid off in the end because I didn't have to do nearly as much filing as I had feared to get the sides parallel with each other. In the end when I stacked the rings back together I measured about 9mm so I only lost 1mm in the process.

You can see the simple design I chose for the three pieces. I used the saw blade to cut the grooves in the middle ring and then filed semi-circles into the edges of the three pieces.

Here is the finished band ring after I soldered it all back together again. It turned out well on the outside but not great on the inside, which is better than having the opposite happen but is not completely satisfying.

The soldering went relatively well and none of it got into the grooves of the pattern, however I could have been more precise when wiring the three thin rings together into a stack to begin with. The middle piece was out of centre by a few fractions of a millimeter which was evident when I went to file the outside. I managed to file away the solder grooves from the outside except where they were intentionally left as part of the pattern on the top. Unfortunately You can see two thin dark lines on the inside of the ring where the solder grooves were.  Eventually the instructor told me to stop filing because the ring was getting too thin.  My OCD made that a challenge to do!