Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Carbon Fibre Wedding Ring

This project was to make a carbon fibre wedding ring for a good mate of mine.

Final Tooling - Ring bore reduced from 19.0mm to 18.5mm ID. Extra length gave more room to manage the fibre on and off the ring mould surface.


Laying the carbon tow in a helical pattern to give an attractive finish on the inside of the ring.

Laminate built up ready to be consolidated

Heatshrink used to compact the laminate and provide an even outside surface finish.

Heatshrink has been shrunk down.

The cured ring was demoulded and setup in a purpose made jig/clamp for holding the ring.

The surface was turned on the lathe to remove excess material and then sanded and hand filed to give the desired outer profile/shape

A layer of epoxy was applied to the outer surface of the ring to be the final finishing surface of most of the ring.

The ring was setup in a rotating axis (4th Axis) on the CNC router to cut the grooves at the appropriate angle.

Cutting to full depth.

Finished groove ready for the gold to be glued in

I bought the gold online in 4.5x4.5mm square wire that gets cut to the length you order. I ordered a 10mm length hoping I could get enough for two rings out of it incase anything went pear shaped

Test fitting the filled down/shaped Rose gold

Test fitting the filled down/shaped white gold.

I used eposy resin to glue the gold in. Once cured I carefully hand shaped the gold with a small file to match the ring shape.

Progressively filing my way down.

Sanding with fine wet and dry sand paper.

All polished up and complete.

All polished up and complete.

I then turned up a pedestal to hold the ring and plaque to glue into the box. 

In hindsight this box was way too big to fit into the best mans pocket, but should work nicely at home.