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

I love it, I think it's super unique and when I started going out I thought my

wheelchair

would divert people from going out with me. I never thought it would be something someone would want to put on their

wedding

ring

. Today we're going to do something a little different. I'm getting married in a couple of days and instead of going out and buying a generic

wedding

ring

I'm going to do something a little more personal. Cambrie My fiancé was injured in a horseback riding accident about 15 years ago. years and this is his first

wheelchair

made of

titanium

.

I'm going to take a strip of that

titanium

embedding it in this 14 karat

gold

and make a ring that has more of a story, more of a connection for her and I, let's get started so obviously the solid strip of

gold

is nowhere near ready. for the ring. I can't just drop this on my fingers and be ready to go. It takes many steps and special skills to get to that point. Luckily, one of my good friends. The last five years you know quite a bit about how to make rings and the first thing we need to do is anneal this metal, which is basically soften it so that we can start working with it, so that when you get flat material like this gold, it comes from the factory.

Quite difficult because the way they extrude it and the way they process it, heating it with a blowtorch, disperses those molecules and softens it again and makes it more manageable. Heating it also turns the gold black, which takes away the shine for now. but we'll fix that later, then we'll take a jeweler's saw with a very thin metal cutting blade and we'll cut each end of the ring so the prongs line up and we can adjust it to the correct size, so we have everything is pretty lined up, we have a small edge on top sticking out but we need to take a file and file it down anyway, solder won't join dirty metal so we need to remove it. this black oxidation top layer so we can get a really strong bond with the gold.

The reason we have to align the ends is because soldering is not like soldering where the solder fills in the gaps in the solder if you have a little. of a space, these are the ends of the metal that you can fill that space with welding, but with welding you have to have all the metal in contact because if it is like that and only one point is touching, only that point will join the The welding is basically like glue. Solder is an alloy of gold and other metals that has a lower melting point than the gold ring itself, so when we solder this together we need to use flux and the flux is an antioxidant agent, so it keeps the metal clean so you can get a really clean joint with the solder.

Hey win anyway, more than anything I'm just trying to see if the solder actually made a good connection with the gold so it looks pretty good, very happy with it. We want the ring to be divided evenly into thirds with the same amount of gold on each side of the titanium centerpiece, so we use the gauge set to two and two thirds to create a dividing line between each of the segments so that We can use the lathe to cut the center. I'm going to start moving this forward so we've been saving the gold scraps from the lathe because they can be melted down and reused later so this is the first cambria wheelchair that got 15 years ago it was made of titanium and The reason it is made of titanium and not something similar to steel is because titanium is 40% lighter than steel while still being as strong as steel.

The reason why wheelchairs have to be so light is that the people in them are usually constantly moving and transporting themselves and the chair at the same time and the heavier the chair, the harder it is to move, so We're going to take a piece of this chair and embed it in a gold ring. Another interesting thing with titanium is that it is biocompatible, meaning that the titanium can be used inside your body, whether for screws or rods, and it is also non-magnetic, meaning that if you have an MRI it will not affect the titanium. inside your body because of all the cool properties and high strength-to-weight ratio, titanium is quite a bit more expensive than, say, steel, but because of how light it is, it's totally worth it.

Cambrie has upgraded her wheelchair several times since the first one, so she won't mind if we use it. We take some sliver, we're going to put this on the lathe, we're going to square it up real nice and then we're going to take this and cut the two millimeter slice that we need to embed it in the ring, so now we're measuring the distance inside the groove of the 14 karat gold ring so we can take that measurement to the titanium insert and mark it along the edge of the ring so we can cut it to the correct size and now we have the gold that we have been working on before and the titanium insert, which is extremely light and, although made of metal, weighs about the weight of a toothpick, which is very lucky for us, the diameter of the wheelchair is almost the same diameter of the ring with a A little sophisticated manipulation of metal.

Westin should be able to get it to fit around the outside. Show us how to avoid cutting the titanium. We're going to shrink one side of this ring, slide the titanium over the top, and then expand it back. and the way we're going to do it is with this ring resizer and these little holes are shaped like a cone, so when you push the ring down, it forces the ring to fold back on itself once it shrinks enough, let's to slide it. Place the titanium over the top in the slot and expand it back into the ring stretcher, so we have been compressing one side of the ring and it is now 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 is because of the ring crusher, so now we will put it back on the ring stretcher and bring it back so that look like before, so after each couple passes. with the ring casting we anneal it again to soften the gold and make sure it doesn't crack, then we go back to the ring casting and then we anneal again and repeat the process probably 20 times more than black oxidation on gold. and the titanium should come off after we finish polishing it, when everything has formed again.

These titanium chips are so light that they basically appear to contain air or Styrofoam. It's kind of like metallic cotton candy. Now both sides have been stretched equally. It is uniform titanium. the center now we just need to size it. I'm a size 10 and right now it's about a size nine, so after a lot of sanding with the flexible shaft rotary tool we finally have the ring in size, now it's time to clean it. Lift and level the top, so we put in the titanium centerpiece and now we just have the gold. We are going to sand off the oxidation and leave it with a brushed finish.

There you have it, the ring is made in 14 karat brushed gold. with the Westin titanium inlay on a scale of one to ten how difficult the project was I would give it a solid nine maybe ten it was a lot harder than you know some of the other inlays I have done are like antler or turquoise, some of these other softer things, you know, it was quite difficult, that's true, titanium is like it's high up on the hardness scale and it's like it's super compact and brittle, I guess we had to be careful when we wanted to lower it, but I think it turned out quite nice.

It's worth having friends with skills if you want to see more projects Weston has done. His Instagram is Roseannville. You know, mine. Zach's Jerry Rig. It's crazy to think that this ring was once part of Cambrie's first chair. So Cambrie, what do you think was worth cutting a piece off your old chair? Yes, I love it, I think it's super unique and when I started going out I thought my wheelchair would divert people from going out with me. I never thought it would be something like this. someone would want to put on their wedding ring and I love it, I think it's a good story and it's something that was a big part of your life a long time ago oh, it's a big part of my life right now and well, that chair in particular, We'll be married by the time you 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 classrooms full of desks with our name to a school. in Kenya and as a result of that we raised over twenty thousand dollars to build an entire school in Africa, an entire school, so I'm going to take to Cambrie to see the desks inside donated to schools in Africa and see the school. that you paid and the donations are not over yet, we still have time to maybe I mean this is an exaggerated funding for a second school in Africa and even if we don't fund the school, the money we will use for water storage. or water filtration or books for the library, every penny will be used for schools in Africa, so if you haven't seen it yet, I'll leave you a link to the What's inside family channel where they revealed our wedding gift.

I'll put a link for that here and below in the video description. Make sure you watch it. It made me cry, so it's super special. Thank you very much for watching and see you.