Cleaning Up & Resizing a Cast Ring

We were all provided with a casting for a stone set ring that was in pretty bad condition (a result of the mold material breaking down apparently).

We cut off the sprue and went to work cleaning up the band with a file (I don’t think much could have been done to save the head).  A lot of material had to be removed to get down to a nice clean surface.

We then had to resize the ring using the insert method as before.
However the presence of a head made this much more difficult.  The head cannot be misshapen in any way or the stones will fall out.  Increasing the size and then making it round again on a mandrel will cause such a distortion.  A resized stone set ring will therefore never be perfectly circular (and a customer must be made aware of this before the work is done).
After cutting the band at the “back” the ends were eased apart with ring pliers.  The exact length of the insert had to be guessed really, as an accurate size cannot be measured from here on.

As before, V shapes were filed into the raw ends and a corresponding section of new metal was soldered in place.