Bullet Casing Ring

I've made a good bit of jewelry. This was, without a doubt, one of the most difficult I have crafted. Please, don't try this. Your mother, brother, girlfriend, boyfriend, father, child - you name it - will probably hate me for writing this, because you will be mentally unstable for life. However, for the sake of posterity, I will tell you how I did it. As my title suggests, I made a ring out of a bullet shell. I used a .223 (5.56) casing, but with extra work you could use something else (or less if you had access to a .50 caliber shell... if it had been that big, I might have been surprised at how easy my task was). If you don't have a gun, try finding someone who does, or you could try to get on a shooting range and pick up some casings there. I used some more specific tools, but if you stick around, I will offer alternative options for nearly all of them.

For the ring itself, you will only need:

1: A bullet casing

2: Solder (the kind that has silver in it and is used for plumbing)

3: Solder flux (this makes the solder flow nicely and helps with joint strength)

for the optional, mental health-destroying, later steps, you will also need:

4: a shard of glass

5: fabric to hold the glass (unless you have leather hands, then you should be fine)

Here is the list of tools I used:

1: Jewelry saw

2: Soldering Iron

3: Pliers

4: Hammer

5: Vice (for banging on)

6: Dremel with various attachments (honestly, this isn't necessary, but is VERY helpful)

7: Flat file (a round one may help as well if you don't have a Dremel)

8: Patience and dedication

In this step, you - wait, not you, I said don't do this! - I cut the bullet apart using my jewelry saw. You can see in the first picture approximately where I made the cut at the bottom, and the top was cut where the tapering began/ended. The second picture shows that I ended up with a basic brass tube and two extra pieces. if you plan to set a stone, keep the piece with the primer in it. After admiring my tube, I cut it once lengthwise and used pliers and a hammer to flatten it (I used the vice to pound on). I hope you can see by now that I cut this approximate square into strips. I could have gotten five out of it, but I only needed three.

I need to note here that a vice is expensive, and if you don't have a jewelry saw, you may not want to get one (I don't know why). You do not need either of them. If you have any sort of metal-cutting saw, you can use it for this. The Jewelry saw was more efficient, but I already told you that I had extra metal. The Vice could be replaced by your garage floor or a sidewalk. I just used it to pound on.

Let's get on with it.

Up to this point, the steps have been fairly easy. Here, they get a little more difficult, but I suppose can encourage you to get this far. As my first photo shows, I soldered the three pieces of brass together. Take careful note of their thickness. Bullet casings are tapered in thickness from the back end up to the bullet so that the pressure of the explosion that starts at the back doesn't rupture the casing and cause issues. I soldered the thinnest parts of two strips together with plenty of overlap so that it would strengthen the thin brass as well as make the thickness uniform. The third strip was fastened thin to thick because there were no available thin ends. The challenge to making these connections is getting the brass hot enough that the solder will bond securely where you want it, but also not melt the joint you just finished.

Also, just so we are clear, Important Notice: There are two types of solder readily available. One has a flux-filled core, but it also may have a lead content. Don't use electronics solder on jewelry. The type of solder I use is called silver solder and it has been approved for plumbing lines (that means you can lick it if you want... just don't be weird about it.), and you should definitely use flux to make the joints easy and strong. Additionally, silver solder has a much stronger bond. One last thing to know: less is more when soldering like this. In my first photo, you can see that I flattened a piece of solder wire till it was about three times thicker than aluminum foil. I only used the smallest slivers of this when making joints. Anyway, look at the second and third pictures to see that I bent the strip into a circle that was sized for the finger I want to put it on, and then it was connected and the excess brass was cut off. Thank you for reading all the way through this. On to the next step.

This step is easy enough. I used a Dremel with a grindstone attachment to clean up the rough edges and a wire wheel to make it shiny. I you don't have a Dremel, you can just use any round file (or get rid of those nasty edges before you "circulate" the strips) and a wire brush or steel wool to polish it better. At this point, you can be done! it looks like a nice, simple ring that you should be proud of. But what about the end piece you were saving? I'll tell you what I did next.

As you can see in the photos, I hammered the primer out and cut the butt if the shell in half. I used the half that was once facing the inside of the shell because it went from a large hole where the primer was to a smaller hole that the spark came out of. I drilled out that smaller hole until it had a much smaller "lip" because I wanted more of the stone to be visible. After this, I used a flat file to make the circle into a square that just fit around the hole. Sadly, I didn't have any pictures of this step so you can look at the final image and imagine. The last, and most definitely the most important step is to drop this devilish little hunk of scrap metal as many times as possible. I mean, who doesn't like feeling their heart drop at the idea of losing long, hard, and detailed work?

If you use glass jars or bottles and throw them away, this is a good gemstone option for you. I had a jar that I broke, rescued a shard from, and ground into the shape I wanted. You have to be careful with glass because.. well, its sharp. It is also brittle, so breakage is a danger that made me sweat every time I worked on it. I used some sort of diamond abrasive that came with my Dremel to do this, and it made the job go very quickly. alternatively, you could use a stone designed for shaping ceramics or something (I used one to grind the stone shorter so that it would fit into the setting because the high speed of the Dremel scared me), but it will take a very long time, and you may break the glass if you are careless.

Attaching the setting was by far the most difficult task of the entire process. I tried for well over an hour to attach it, only to realize that I couldn't attach it over top of one of my joints in the ring and get a connection that even resembled flush contact. The challenge was that, in order to get the solder to bond, the heat would separate the other joints that held the ring together. A complex combination of needle nose pliers and small D-clamps to hold them shut enabled me to eventually attach the setting and keep the ring together. Honestly, if you find an effective way to do this yourself, don't listen to me. Use your own method. My tutorial here should only be a stepping stone to your own project.

I love that I was able to use a piece of garbage and use it for something beautiful. You may have noticed that, in my pictures the glass "bead" was a brownish color in the final image. This was just something that happened because the flux underneath burned, and the color was reflected by the glass. When unplanned changes like this happen, why not just take them and appreciate the uniqueness? My instructions here are really meant to broaden the perspective of the community. Use them as a guide, not a manual. If you liked even one part of this, why don't you vote for me in the jewelry contest. there should be a link at the bottom of this paragraph or something. Heck, if you are gonna do that, why not add this to your favorites to let me know that I had an impact. Now turn off the internet and make something!