We Made a 5000 Year Old Bog-wood Glow Ring

A lot of interesting things are currently in the works. The first and biggest thing is that we are growing incredibly fast. This is exciting for our company, but there are a few growing pains. The biggest growing pain is that our turnaround time for shipping orders is a little slower because we currently are getting a large amount of new orders which means we need to get more employees hired and trained. Hopefully in the next few weeks, we will have made it through this transition period and will be back to running as smoothly as ever.

This week we made an amazing ring. Patrick has had a 5000 year old piece of bog-wood at his house for a few months now, and we finally decided that we would turn it into a ring. Bog-wood is wood that has been buried in peat bogs for hundreds or thousands of years, but it doesn't decay due to the conditions of the bog. This fossilizes the wood which creates a beautiful natural finish. 

The first part of making this ring was finding a crack. The ring was then split along the crack and glued into two end pieces to create a nice frame. Patrick then filled the split with glow powder and superglue to create a stripe of strontium aluminate down the ring. A diamond tipped cutting saw was then used in our drill press to cut the ring out with the stripe of strontium alumintate slightly off centered. This created a nice doughnut shape that could then be sanded down using a dremel. Following the dremel the lathe was used to shave the ring creating clean edges. 

The final two steps were fairly similar to any of our other rings. A range of sand papers were applied to create a smooth finish on the outside and inside of the ring. Our normal final finishing step would be to polish the ring; however, with this ring we applied a mineral oil finish instead of a polish. This let us darken the wood and treat it, so that it would be protected from water. 

This ring turned out really cool and was a great project to test some new manufacturing ideas we have for non metallic rings. We hope you enjoyed learning a little more about it and hope to see you next week.