Stretching wedding bands

I have tried to make plain wedding bands that can be stretched
without distortion but so far haven’t been successful. I’ve tried a
rolling alloy and didn’t have much better luck. Is there specific
heat treatment which allows the metal to be stretched without
distorting or breaking?

Make sure you get a good weld or solder joint. Anneal after every
half size stretched…for yellow gold. I would do it more often with
the white.

Russ

You probably should be annealing the metal before trying to stretch
it. However, this may be infeasible if there are stones in the band.
Also different metals will need different treatments, I am speaking
mostly of silver and gold.

John

Robert- Are you fabricating or casting your bands?

If you are using gold, silver or platinum you should have no problem
stretching a band. Have you annealed them before you stretch? How
are you stretching them? Hammer or ring stretcher? I can get at least
a size and a half on a stretcher or with a hammer.

Have fun and make lots of jewelry.
Jo Haemer
timothywgreen.com

What method of stretching are you using? If you are using a
bench-mounted ring cam-based stretcher (and I have no idea what the
proper name for these is), then the trick is to use nylon collars
which prevent the expanding mandrel from cutting into the ring. Most
plain wedding rings can be stretched, although it is important to be
careful, and anything with a soldering joint is going to require a
much slower stretch. Not sure why you’d be getting distortion. Why
are the cross-section measurements of the rings? One common issue is
getting a taper from stretching the ring on one side more than
another, and if this isn’t stopped, you can get some distortion
that’s hard to remove, but this can be avoided by sizing slowly,
annealing regularly, and ensuring that you do a little on one side,
flip, and then do a little on the next side, and then repeat.

If you are hammering on a mandrel, or bashing it up a mandrel, that’s
going to be harder to control, although I do most of my sizing by
tapping carefully with a hammer, so it’s certainly possible to do it
that way (although some things like flat courts or rectangular
section rings are much harder to do this way).

Jamie Hall
www.primitivemethod.org