Skull ring tutorial 1

For those who have stumbled onto this posting randomly, this is the first step of a wax carving tutorial of a ring for jewelry fabrication. The wax tubes in the photos are known as ring blanks. Carving rings from tubes like these instead of solid blocks has a couple of advantages, as you can see they come in many different sizes and shapes for producing the more typical forms of rings. Using a wax tube will save carving time as well as time with layout of patterns. The cut off piece of tubing in the center of the photo will be my ring carving. I have used a small saw to cut the wax tube to the size of the ring that I am going to carve. The center holes of the wax blanks come very small (about ring size 4), so you have to carve the inside diameter to the size of ring that you want to produce. The tool that you can see with the red coating is a type of mandrel that has a blade for reaming out these ring blanks. It has lines on it representing the different ring sizes. You simply insert it into the wax form and twist it to remove small amounts of material until you have the desired size of ring that you wish to produce. I carved this particular ring to a size 12.5. If you look closely you can see that I have also used a small ruler and scribed center points to all sides of the ring. This is crucial since I will be working subtractively, if you can't keep track of what you are carving away, you are probably F#?&!ng it up.