Imgur user jmman was handed a wedding ring brought to him by a man after it fell into the garbage disposal. As you can imagine – the ring was pretty much destroyed to the point that it was unrecognisable but thanks to the skill of the jman he was able to restore the ring to almost better than new. Take a look at the process below.
This is how the ring looked before restoration after being dropped in a garbage disposal unit.
The ring was in a very sorry state and hardly recognisable.
Firstly he began using pliers to widen the ring enough to get it onto a ring mandrel.
Once it was on the ring mandrel it was time to get hammering. Using a goldsmiths hammer he slowly begins hammering the ring into a round shape again.
One perfectly round ring. Time to start on all of those nasty scratches.
Using a file to remove surface scratches and restore the once straight edges of the ring.
Filing away to much causes unnecessary thinning, so the file was only used to remove small imperfections.
To prevent thinning the deeper scratches were removed by filling them with 14kt gold using a hand torch.
Despite his best efforts, two of the diamonds could not be saved as they were too badly damaged by the garbage disposal.
He removed the two diamonds that were broken and replaced them with new ones.
Then the polishing could begin. This restored the rough edges and made the ring smooth.
And finally buffering. This gave the ring it’s shine back and looks like the most rewarding part of the entire process.
The finished and fully restored wedding ring. You can hardly recognise it!
The man got his wedding ring back as good as new and jman got to work on a fun project. Apparently he doesn’t usually work on such damaged jewellery, but it just goes to show how skilled he really is.
Source: Imgur
