Make a Striped Wooden Ring!

This is a simple, easy to make ring made of plywood. It looks a bit different to a typical metal ring, but it is fun to make and it does not feel uncomfortable.

To make your own will take you anywhere between 30 minutes to 4 hours, depending on what tools you have and how good you want it to look/feel.

I had fun making this, but it did take me longer than expected.

So let's get started!

(If you found this guide useful, please vote for it in the Jewelry contest and/or Woodworking contest! Thanks! :D)

To make this simple ring you need one material, plywood.

The ply I used was (I think) Pine, and was 1 cm thick, with 5 layers of wood. Any type of wood should work though, but this will only hold together if you use layered plywood, preferably with very thin layers (the kind I used was 2 mm per layer).

The tools you will need are:

- Drill with a circle-cutting attachment of the right size (I used one with a diameter of 3 cm) [See picture 1]
- A dremel tool (Or a drill with dremel attachments)
- A hand-file
- A drill bit
- Sandpaper (I used 2 different grit sandpapers, P60 and P100)
- Thin foam rubber/ paper/ cardboard etc. to make a soft washer out of.
- A knife or a chisel to separate layers of plywood

For the dremel you will need the following attachments:
- A sandpaper cylinder with a screw-in top
- Fine and coarse sandpaper for the cylinder

Using the drill with the circle-cutter attachment, cut a hole out of your sheet of plywood. It should look like the piece of wood in picture one when removed from the circle-cutter. The cutter should also have a central drill bit to make a hole, if it does not then you need to mark the centre of the circle before cutting and drill one.

If you need to, split layers of wood from the circle with a knife or chisel. The wood should be about 6 mm thick. This meant I had to remove 2 layers from the ply I was using. Be careful not to damage the part of the wood you will be using!

Sand the disk a little  on either side, to remove any little bits of wood remaining from the layers you removed.

The easiest and fastest way to shape your ring is to attach it to a dremel tool.

The way I did this was:

Cut two foam-rubber discs to use as soft washers that would not damage the wood. You can also use cardboard or paper or rubber.

Take your sandpaper cylinder apart. Unscrew the top screw and remove the washer. Take off the rubber sandpaper holder and you should be left with the parts in picture 2.

Place a soft washer onto the metal one on the shaft, then the wooden disk, then the second soft washer, then the top metal washer, then screw them together and make sure that the wood is properly centred on the shaft.

This should look like mine in picture 3.

Lathe it! In the last picture you can see how I shaped it, using a piece of sandpaper and moving the disk on it to achieve the desired shape. To see what this shape should look like, watch this video (not mine)

https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-a-bracelet/

And once that is done, move to finer sandpaper and smooth the shape further.

Remove the disk from the dremel, and put it back together as it was before with sandpaper.

Use a drill to enlarge the hole if you can, but I did not have a large drill bit so I twisted the drill around in the existing hole to make it big enough for a hand file to fit through.

Once you can fit a file into the hole, use it to enlarge the hole until you can fit the dremel sandpaper cylinder into it. This took me about 45 minutes to do, so be prepared for a time-consuming process!

Once you can fit it in, place the sandpaper cylinder into the ring and sand it until it fits your finger. Start with coarse sandpaper and move to fine sandpaper to make it fit smoothly onto your finger.

Your ring is complete! :D

All you need to do now is add varnish or oil of your choice to protect the wood and you're done! :)