Making a Star Dust Glowstone Ring

This article is about making a Star Dust Glowstone ring. We start with the cobalt-chromium base. It's a really high-tech material, used in jet turbines, medical implants, it's a very high-tech material.

I've never offered it as a style before on my website but it's a very cool material. It holds a really good polish but it's not quite as hard and heavy as tungsten carbide. It's like a perfect medium as far as materials go.

Later on in the process, we added meteorite. This is in the form of small shavings, almost like a powder of meteorite. This adds to the whole space effect that we've got going on here. This makes it have just a slight amount of reflection coming off of it. This makes the ring pop.

Then we used moonstone. We crushed up a little pile pretty small. I think, moonstone really fits the theme well. It's got a really cool iridescent look to it or if you catch it at the right angle it's got a really nice blue hue. Then we add diamonds. These are smaller diamonds. There are about 400 diamonds per case. But I need them to be smaller and so I pulverized these, by crushing them up a little bit and getting them a lot smaller.

Sprinkling diamond dust, they look like just teeny little stars in our space-themed ring and then, of course, we got to make it glow. So I added some aqua glow.

My first step was crushing up all of the materials to almost a powder. I used a metal block and then I used a roll of electric tape to contain all of the contents that we got inside. Then I crushed it until I got the size of the pieces that I wanted. After that I poured them into a bag and set it aside for later.   

Then I worked on the diamonds. The diamonds are really tricky because they're very hard and they can be really tricky to crush. I found that the best way to do this is get a huge chunk of stainless steel, weighing about five pounds. I put it on the diamond and then I take a hammer and I hit the top of the stainless steel with that. I found that works a lot better than any of the other methods that you'll see me trying and experimenting with.  

A little later, I combined all of the materials all into one vial and shook them together. That’s why we need the diamonds small. Now I've got all four of our materials ready to go. Diamonds, Moon Stone, Aqua glow powder and meteorite shavings.

Then I added all the materials to the vial. You can see all the four separate materials and they're in layers. I shook it up to have a completely homogeneous mix of everything. That way the whole ring will look fairly identical all the way around.

I then put the ring into the expanding ring mandrel and poured the startdust mix. I just put down one thin layer of our medium viscosity adhesive and then once I do that I poured in our Stardust mix. I like to fill it up until it is completely saturated to the adhesive and repeat the process. In between I used a little bit of our CA accelerator. You do want to be careful with this so I took my time. I hardened it when I needed to.

Now that is all the way built up, we can get ready to sand it down. This was tricky for this ring. This has a lot of diamond dust inside and it went through a lot of sandpaper. Sandpaper just gets destroyed by diamond particles because they're just so much harder than the actual sandpaper. I started off with 220 grit after I'm done with the Dremel and I use a really big piece of this that way I can get all the scratches that we made with the Dremel out.

Then I went all the way up to a 1500 grit on the sandpaper and to polish this ring. I can't use our normal method with the buffing wheel because our cobalt chromium material is so hard that it's not able to polish that metal. So I used diamond paste and so I started off with a 50 micron paste and that gets rid of any of the scratches that we had left in there from our sanding.

Then we went down to a 5 micron paste and this leaves us with a very highly reflective finish. It looks perfect! It's almost a mirror finish. I took it inside wash it off with water and then dried it off. And the ring is finished!

Check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiFIfKikJRM