Personal connection
2nd March 2023 - Customer Location: Geneva, Switzerland
The customer’s late Father’s wedding ring.
Nearly 3 years ago I was contacted by a Millaa Millaa man now living overseas to make a wedding ring for him out of his late father’s wedding ring.
With restrictions lifted in 2022 he could now travel back to Cairns to start the process. Making the ring he had in mind would require more gold than the existing 18ct yellow gold ring contained. It was decided to convert that 18ct gold to 9ct giving us double the gold to work with.
The platypus repeats 4 times around the ring and is a link to a very special memory he has of time spent with his late Father.
This customer is a very busy man always short on time. When he initially told me he would be unavailable to go through my draft sizing process on his visit back to Cairns I told him I could not make the ring. He made the time because he had to …..this ring has detail 360 degrees around……it would not be resizable.
Article: Rings that cannot be resized
One of the trials in metal.
Long story short we spent a lot of time coming up with a design and then testing the spacing and sizing with trial and error. After a lot of planning I was ready to make the ring……then I got another email.
But wait there is more
Custom creating the text for my engraving machine to read.
Ready to make the ring I had another not so straight forward request put to me. I probably should have said no but glad I did not:
“PS would it be possible to include an engraving on the inside? If so, I’d like to have the word ‘Forever’ in cursive two or three times (depending on space available), ideally with the ‘r’ at the end linked to the ‘F’ at the start with a slightly curved line so that the words are connected. Does that make sense?”
I do not hand engrave. I use an engraving machine that reads a file created on a computer to tell it what to write. Problem was that none of my standard fonts in the computer program that drive the engraver would produce what the customer wanted.
I found a font on the internet sort of suitable and then recreated/modified it on my computer in a format that I could pass into the engraving software that drives the engraver.
A trial run of the engraving.
I did a trial run of diamond drag engraving the double line custom font on my engraver and emailed the result to the customer who was by now back overseas. He approved it and I was ready to go.
Above is the finished ring. Right from the start we discussed oxidising the recessed areas. We did this for three reasons:
add depth to the ring
highlight and contrast shapes
create an earthy rustic feel
Of course the finishing touch is the internal engraving. A very big thank you to this customer for allowing me to be part of creating this very touching tribute to his Father. I know I can be difficult to work with at times.