3D printing your wedding ring
Shapeways community member Alec Cox designed his wedding ring in Blender and had it 3D printed in silver.
Alex writes:[Caitlin and I] went to the same high school but have gone to different colleges (she goes to MIT, I go to a school in Ohio) for undergraduate, so 3D printing has given me the ability to create our rings where distance has taken away the traditional ritual of shopping for rings together. While I initially tried to smelt the rings myself, this resulted in a pile of useless silver slag and a whole heap of danger concerning oxy-acetylene torches.
So, while I have no experience at all with smelting metal, I have a little experience with the 3D modeling program Blender. This let me add the amount of personalization to our rings that we wanted while keeping the price-point down (you know how crazy expensive wedding bands get). While I kept my wedding ring a simple toroid scaled in the z axis (with not that many faces), I added a ton of resolution to her ring so that I could use the sculpt tool in Blender to write a line from a Beatles song on the inside (a mutual love of the Beatles is part of the reason we started dating).
The quote in the ring is “Love you forever and forever” from the song “I Will.”
Congratulations!
Link
Wonderful!!! Gotta love Shapeways!
We have our 10 year wedding anniversary coming up, and I am making something for her from Shapeways too. Can’t wait!
Congratulations to to you both!
“… thrakatuluk krimpatul…”
Oh, sorry.
What?
What Bart Said?
Lord of the Rings, One ring to rule them all?
In that case, I’m forced to say “English only, please” ;-)
yeah, not too many people know the Tongue of Mordor. :)
My wife and I were married on November 11th, of 2011. And I actually designed a ring for me and her in Blender but the time it would have taken to print them and ship them missed our date… :/ But now she has 3 on her finger soo… haha. Awesome to see the idea being used. +1
I did almost the same thing in December… but it was a wedding gift for my friends just married, and instead of a ring, I made a small statue with 2 dogs and their names (friend’s not dogs), I had not enough money for the Silver version, so I ordered in White Strong & Flexible (plastic). It was nice and they liked.
You can see it on my website (French), at the bottom of the page :
http://karl-stein.com/2012/04/02/3d-imprimer-un-objet-3d-chez-sculpteo/
I ordered it on Sculpteo.com, not Shapeways.com.
cool idea! will keep an eye on shapeways for printing a mario figure or something!
What price are we looking at?
I’m curious as to what price also…
It depends a lot on the size of the ring of course but usually rings are around $90-$140.
Here’s an example:
http://www.shapeways.com/model/273819/explorers-ring-u3-version.html
(Under ‘select material’, pick ‘silver glossy’).
Here are some more rings so you can have a look at their prices:
http://www.shapeways.com/gallery/jewelry/rings
Another option is to print the ring in plastic and then have a jeweller cast it in whatever metal you want (eg gold). The ‘lost wax’ casting method actually uses ‘lost plastic’, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it! When jewellers are using 3d printers, this is the technique they use – print the ring in plastic, then cast using the sacraficial printing. I wrote up some notes on how the process works on my blog if you are interested: http://www.wekadesign.com/blog/?p=1
Oh, and cool idea nicely executed Alex.
We tried ‘lost plastic casting’, but found that it doesn’t burn out as cleanly as wax. At Shapeways we use a very high resolution wax printer to print the original (and we’re looking in to offering the wax models for sale, too).
Yes, I have heard that it can be a problem depending on which particular ‘plastic’ the printer spits out. Still a new technology I think :)