Ice Pick Ring for Jimmy Diresta

Today I finally got the opportunity to make a ring for someone that has been a HUGE inspiration to me, Jimmy Diresta. I had the amazing opportunity to go spend some time with him over the summer, and he was generous enough to give me one of his famous ice picks. Well, today I decided I wanted to return the favor and create a ring for him that is inspired by his ice pick. I decided to take a piece of brass and machine it into a hexagon shape, so that it would closely resemble his ice pick. I then decided it would be cool to use a stamp set, and stamp "Diresta" onto the ring like he does on his ice picks.

The Process: My first step was to cut off a small piece of brass from a brass rod that I had. I made the piece a little wider than I wanted the actual ring to be, so that I had enough material to trim both the faces. I then start drilling out the center of the ring, until it was a little bit bigger than the finishing size I wanted.

Now that I had the hole out in the middle, I started to shape out the hexagon shape in the ring. To do this I used a belt sander and moved the ring around by hand. It was a challenge to get the edges to be a perfect 90 degree angle. The first step I did was just sanding a flat face onto the ring, and then I was able to base the rest of my measurement off of that. I then glued one of the flat sides of the ring onto a 1,2,3 block, so that I could make sure I was getting straight lines. The next two angles, were a little bit challenging because they needed to be positioned correctly from the other two angles. To measure these angles out perfectly, I used a protractor and I marked a line coming out of the center of the ring to a 120 degree angle. I then had one rounded side still left on the ring so I glued the semi-completed ring onto my 1,2,3 block and sanded the rounded side down. Doing this process made the ring look perfectly proportioned.

After I had the hexagon shape that I wanted, I put the ring on my expanding ring mandrel and used my carbon lath bit to chamfer the edges of it. The chamfer itself extends a little bit past the hexagon, so it just gives the ring a unique look and made it look like it was really modeled after the ice pick.

Now that the shape of the ring was were I wanted it, it was time to sand down the ring and polish it up. I sanded the inside of the ring until I had a size 13 and I worked my sandpaper up until I had a perfectly polished ring. My last step was to use my stamping set to stamp Diresta onto the ring and it was finished!