Making a Dinosaur Fossil Ring from Real Dinosaur Bone

I made a ring out of a dinosaur fossil. The piece is really cool and has some b-roll. It's awesome and has a cell structure that you can still see. The amount of preservation the piece has had over its 150 million year lifespan is incredible. I love how you can see all those details in here. The inspiration for this ring is from my Ford Raptor. I thought there would be nothing better than a dinosaur ring to go with my dinosaur truck. 

I especially think you could do this at home as you're not going to need a lot of materials or tools for it. It's actually easier than you think to source real authentic dinosaur bone. You can simply go on eBay and there are some really incredible guys on there with great reviews and good authenticity. All you need is a piece of dinosaur bone which is not too expensive. 

The piece is big enough to make quite a few rings so if you were to get a smaller piece you could just make one ring out of it. You will need some diamond hole saws that way you can cut out all of the inner and outer diameters. It’s important to be really careful with the piece because it's fragile but by doing this will help make things go a lot quicker. We're going to be doing a lot of hand shaping to it so you're going to need some Dremel accessories. I use a diamond cutoff wheel and a bigger diamond cut off and they are both my favorites if you're working with stone. Grumbles are really inexpensive and you can get a knockoff one for $15 on Amazon. You can also get a set of these diamond hole saws for around $15. I'll have links to everything down below.

For the first step, I laid out the piece on my drill press and selected from my diamond hole size and found two that were the most applicable. I then took a ring that already fits me and sized it up to make sure there was enough room for it to wiggle. This way there was a little bit of excess space on there to finish it up and give it a much better surface finish. For the outer piece, I went quite a bit bigger than I needed to because I wanted the piece to be strong. Later on, I sanded it back to some good dimensions. The two pieces ended up looking like a chunky looking ring but once I sanded it made it a lot more uniform and a lot more comfortable to wear.

If you do not have a drill press, you could use a power drill, it would be a little bit more tricky, but the same rules would apply. You just want to use water to keep things from overheating and then you just want to clamp it down gently so that it doesn't crack. You don't want to cut all the way through the material because if you cut all the way through and it detaches, then the piece of dinosaur bone is going to be stuck in there. It would fling around it however many rpms the drill press is going out and it'll completely shatter it. 

I used the depth stop and carefully set my piece of dinosaur bone aside and then put the smaller hole saw in my drill truck. I got in there pretty tight because I didn’t want it slipping because if it goes up into the drill press, the depth stop is not going to be accurate anymore, so you don't want it to slip. I made sure it was good and tight and then brought it down until it was touching the surface of the table in order to cut all the way through the dinosaur bone. I took it a little bit further up and then used the depth stop to stop it and drill through it. When I stopped it,  I used a scrap of paper towel to demonstrate it wasn’t touching. I came to a stop a millimeter or two before it cut all the way through.

You get some perforations and I used the diamond bits on my Dremel to cut it all the way through and then it was a lot more gentle. This way the whole thing didn’t just fall apart. I then selected where I wanted to cut. I didn’t want to waste material so I went in the corner where I could see there was a perfect-sized peninsula sticking off that made a really nice looking ring. It had a really nice pattern there and didn’t use a lot of material so that was a perfect spot. I clamped it down and was very gentle since it was fragile material. I used hand clamps with the rubber tips on it that way there was not too much stress on there. I used some water and had my drill press set to a slow to the medium setting which is not even half of its rpm capability, so it was going pretty slow. I tried to be gentle and take my time and just slowly cut till it was almost all the way through. When I hit the bottom of the depths top I was almost all the way cut through. I didn’t see any cracks which were a good sign. 

I then used the cutoff wheel and cut the donut section off to create a nice little ring shape. I worked with that to refine it and noticed there was a little bit of fracturing going on. If you have a little crack like this show-up, you have to take care of it immediately. You've got a really good chance of it not being an issue later on. I had a super thin super glue called cyan acrylate adhesive and it’s very liquidy which is really important because it uses capillary action to fill in the crack. You put a dab in there and you can instantly see it just suck into all the tiny little cracks and voids in there. It is absolutely necessary and this would not have worked if I would’ve used regular super glue, so don't even bother trying it.

I had a really rough ring shape but I actually made a lot of progress. I took the rest of my diamond pieces and some of the other accessories and trimmed it up, making it a lot more of an elegant actual ring shape. Once I was done with the inside, I needed to trim down the outer diameter of it because it was still quite a thick ring. To do this I got my huge diamond cut off, a super handy tool. I just had some blocks to get the level of it and it creates a little sanding table. The diamond just barely hit, so it gave me a nice big surface to go around and just slowly sand the outer diameter down. I did this by hand, so it was pretty tricky because you want to make sure that you keep your circle that way your inner and outer diameter is concentric. Then you also want to have a nice circular shape and not let it become egg-shaped. You have to be patient and pay really close attention to it because it's easy to get off track and then mess it up.

I got it shaped exactly how I wanted with a nice rounded profile to it. There was still an edge on the outside that was a bit harsh and just needed to be rounded off. I just went through by hand and rounded the whole thing off. I could see there was some like harsh lines where there was just a not good roundness to the bevel of it and I fixed it up and got all the general shaping. I got the bulk of the work done with the bigger more heavy duty tool and then went through and fine-tuned all of it. Once I finished up all of the shapings, it had a really nice profile to both the outside and the inside of the ring.

Finally, I took a Dremel with a finer grit sanding wheel and went over the whole thing to try to get rid of any of the deep scratches that the rougher diamonds left. Once I was done with that, I hit it with some clear coat and the ring was finished. You could see the way the pattern turned out and it was incredible to see how much detail. I loved this piece and the material is one I’m just barely scratching the surface, there is much more to come. 

Diamond Hole Saw Set: https://amzn.to/2tsr7J7

Diamond Dremel Accessories: https://amzn.to/2BDZdP2

Dinosaur Bone Slab: goo.gl/azfUaC (I'd recommend starting on a cheaper material if you're learning)

My Ring Website: https://patrickadairdesigns.com/

My Ring Supplies Website: https://patrickadairsupplies.com/

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