How to Make a Ring From a Coin

Tools:

You will need a hard metal surface to work on.

A hand held drill (or a drill press, which is better)

A circular file and a flat file

A small nut and bolt

A punch

A hammer (it has to be a metal hammer)

Materials:

A coin

Sandpaper

Jewellery polishing paste

Step 2: Hammer Away

Place the coin edge down onto your metal surface. You can use the base of a table vice. For this step, you will slowly roll the coin while tapping it with a hammer. Don’t hit it too hard. Take your time on this part, as you want the coin to form uniformly. After a dozen or so taps, flip the coin around to keep the edges from favoring one side too much. As you progress, the edge of the ring will become wider and wider, and the diameter will become smaller and smaller.

You will want to periodically check the size of your coin ring using a ring you have that you know fits you. This is to make sure we make a ring that is the correct size. Once the coin ring’s diameter is the same as a different ring that fits you, you will want to stop hammering and move on to the next step.

Step 3: Putting a Hole in the Center of the Coin

Grab your punch and line it up on the center of the coin. Once you are satisfied that it is as close to dead center as you can get, tap the punch with your hammer. This will create a small indentation in the center of the coin, so that your drill bit won’t wander and will drill clean through the center.

After the coin is tapped with the punch, grab a pair of pliers to hold the coin with while you drill it. Don’t worry too much about being orthagonal here. Put a piece of scrap wood underneath if you are using a hand drill, so you don’t accidentally drill into the table.

If you are fortunate enough to have a drill press, use that in lieu of a hand drill.

Step 4: Shaping the Ring and Polishing It

In this step, you will need the nut and bolt mentioned earlier. Slide the bolt through the hole, and put the nut on. Tighten it up so that the coin can’t spin. Next, insert the shaft of the bolt into the chuck of your drill or drill press. The drill press is better here because it leaves both of your hands free.

First, we will shape the ring. The edges are kind of bent and non-uniform due to the hammering. To remedy this, we will spin the ring in the drill, and shape it with the flat file. You’ll want to hold the file such that the ring is turning into the file. Hold the file flat against the top of the ring, and curve it to the edge of the ring. This will slowly produce an arc shape instead of a flat edge. Periodically check on the shape of the ring by slowing the drill down.

Once you are satisfied with the shape, grab some sandpaper. Spin the ring up and sand it. You will want to continue this process until the ring’s edge is completely uniform and smooth. After this is done, grab a soft cloth and some jewellery polish. Squeeze a little bit of polish out onto the cloth, and spin the ring up again using the drill. Hold the paper towel up against the ring. The grit in the polish will smoothen the surface, and eventually you will achieve a mirror finish on the ring. Note: it usually takes several minutes of high speed polishing, to achieve a nice polished look, so don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t happen immediately.

Step 5: Finishing Up

Lastly, we need to remove the remaining metal from the inside of the ring. To do this, grab the ring in a table vice as shown above. Here you will want to push a circular file back and forth, slowly removing the interior of the coin. Be careful once you get close to the edges. The inside of the edge will contain the text from the edge of the coin, and you will want to preserve that. To be clear, the text will have wrapped around to the inside band of the ring, and is no longer on the face of the coin. Thus you don’t need to leave very much material in the ring to preserve the text. Once you get really close to the edge check the coin after each swipe with the file. When you start hitting the top of the lettering, stop filing on that side.