3D Printing an Engagement Ring

Folks loved our recent post about making an engagement ring with CNC, so we thought we’d pass along this article from Cubify too.  I had to try the technique described, so here is what I did:

Start by taking a profile photo of your fiance:

Take a profile shot of your fiancee, and use the profile as a form for the ring…

 I drew the red line freehand in Photoshop with the image magnified full screen so I would have something to go by.  I then loaded that image as a background image in my CAD program, Rhino3D.  A lot of CAD programs will do this to make it easy to trace things from images.  Once loaded, I took the spline (curve) tool and started dropping points along the profile outline to create a nice smooth curved that mirror’s the young lady’s profile:

Here is the spline curve tracing in Rhino3D of the profile…

Next, I rotated the spline so it was vertical, and used the spline tool to draw the inside contour of the ring:

3D cross section of the ring…

This left me with a 3D cross section of the ring.  I’m just blasting through this without much regard to scale or ring finger sizing, but you get the idea.  The last step is to rotate that cross section around an axis to produce a 3D model of the ring:

3D Model appears after rotating the cross section around the red axis…

That particular cross section came out a little too thick and industrial strength for the lovely piece of jewelry that the article is written about, but you get the idea.  To wind up with a ring, have the 3D model printed in wax and then the wax model can be cast in silver or gold.  Voila, you have a very unique, personalized, and memorable piece of jewelry!

Here is what the end result looked like:

The finished ring…

Wasn’t that a brilliant idea?  Lots of other cool stuff over on the Cubify blog.  This gives an idea of what’s possible when 3D printing.

I am also checking out their new $49 parametric 3D CAD program and will publish a review after I get more familiar with it.  Thanks to Robert over at GRZSoftare for putting me onto it!

2 Comments

• 
  titanium 2012/07/27 at 11:15 am

  Thanks for the link to the $49 3D cad program. I’m really looking forward to your review.

  Reply
  • 
    SiteOwner 2012/07/27 at 5:45 pm

    Thanks for the comment titanium. I haven’t been able to get it to install properly yet. I presume something is funky at my end. I will try again a little later.

    Reply