Creating a Two Tone Ring
Chuck Koehler
In this issue I’m going to walk you through the creation of a ring with two different colors of gold. My soon-to-be sister-in-law (Kelly) began talking to me about what she wanted in her wedding ring. Of course the first thing that stood out in my mind were those two dreaded words: ‘two-tone’. A lot of mass manufactured jewelry is cast in one color and spot plated to create this effect. For this project, I’m going to actually make it in two different colors of gold.
THE IDEA:
This entire project was done via telephone and email, so as you can imagine, the first few ideas were way off base. But, after a few days of sending ideas and photos back and forth, I had enough of an idea to do a basic sketch. After Kelly saw the sketch, she said that it was almost what she wanted. The only change was to make the yellow gold section about half as thick as the white gold section. If you look closely at the sketch, you can see where I erased the original yellow gold line and brought it in a little. After Kelly saw the revised sketch, she said ‘That’s it! That’s what I want.” (I know I’m not the best sketch artist in the world, but if it sells the job, it’s good enough)
WHERE TO START:
The main problem with creating a piece like this is that you have to treat the two separate metals as separate elements during the casting phase. I thought for a day about how to carve the wax. I originally planned on carving it as two pieces, but decided that wouldn‘t work. I elected to carve the wax as one element and then deal with the casting issue when I got that far. As I’ve said before, if you don’t know where to start just start somewhere and it’ll make itself. That’s exactly what I did. I just started carving and let the piece guide me.
The photo shows the wax beginning to take shape. It’s here that I start trying to visualize exactly what the finished ring is going to look like. I’m also trying to figure out exactly how I’m going to transition from white to yellow and back again.
At first, my plan was to finish and detail only the white gold sections, and then grind away the bulk of the area that will be yellow gold. Then I was going to carve a piece of wax that I could cast in yellow gold and make a ‘cap’ to solder in place. In the end, I changed my mind. Using your optivisor, you can see that I decided to completely finish the wax in the exact form of the finished piece. Next, using an exacto blade, I carefully cut out the entire center section to be cast in yellow gold.
When I started this project, I had no idea that I was going to take an exacto blade and separate the elements in this fashion. It kind of came out of left field. The reason I’m telling you this is simple. This publication’s purpose is to teach bench jewelers new techniques, but also to give you a little insight as to what to expect when you take on a project like this. The insight I’d like to interject is this: When you make custom jewelry, you’re making something that you’ve never made before, so the road isn’t all nicely mapped out. You just start and see where the project takes you. Sometimes you get it right the first time, and sometimes you have to back track a little to make the project work. The key is to be able to look at a project in the beginning and try to estimate the amount of time you’re going to put into making it and charge accordingly. I knew that somewhere in this project I was going to spend several hours resolving the two tone problem. I didn’t know where it was going to crop up, but I knew it was coming. That being said, I added a couple of hour’s labor to the estimate to compensate for this. Remember that it’s not how many hours you spend on a project that matters but how many of those hours did you anticipate and charge for.
Creating a Two Tone Ring continued
