Shinium - Brilliance by Design

A set of silver stacking rings featuring the famous "Amen break" More on  the Amen break here . Of course it's relatively simple to apply this technique to any other sound sample. Maybe the Apache break, or Funky Drummer. Or even something which isn't a breakbeat. 

So, I make quite a few tutorial videos and people always say "yeah, that's cool but what if I don't have all that gear" Well, hopefully this video addresses that problem.

A custom request from a lady of excellent taste, asking for a spitfire ring. Challenge accepted! This video shows how to casting a spitfire using the Delft clay casting system. Delft clay is an oilsand designed for fine casts - it's a mixture of sand, clay and oil. The process is fairly straightforward but as you'll see, it's not as failsafe as other casting methods. I got it right second time though!

I was given a load of old sterling jewellery to make into something new. The video shows the first stage, to melt it down into useful ingots. Once poured, the ingots need cleaning to remove impurities that have come to the surface. The melt-pour-clean process may need repeating several times. Once clean, the ingots can be recast, or forged/rolled into sheet or wire. Casting video to follow soon.

A little while ago I made a media centre for some friends, which had hardware audio playback controls. Much as I love giving people things, I was a bit jealous because it was pretty cool thing (even if I do say so myself). When the opportunity came up to make one for our upcoming wedding, I jumped at the chance, and added a few features extra to the original design. A little time scouring the internet for parts and then, time to assemble: First up, out with the ironing board (soldering iron is an iron, right?). The dotstar LEDs run at 5v and the Pi's GPIO outputs at 3.3v, so we need a level shifter/bus buffer to bump the volts up a bit. Terrible messy circuit "diagram", but it worked. You can see the LED layout down at the bottom, there are six pins on each one - power, ground, clock in, data in, clock out, data out. This means they can be chained and addressed individually by software. They're pretty smart little things. Dotstars are new and a little more f...

In this post , I showed how I made my Raspberry Pi jukebox. Here's how it is controlled. At it's core, it's just a python script which waits for interrupts from the Pi's GPIO pins. That's the easy bit (although it would be a lot easier if there wasn't two different ways to number GPIO pins - I mean really...) I do know that just making a bunch of functions isn't particularly pythonic and I should probably do something with classes and objects and stuff, but I had a really immovable deadline on this project so I just stuck with what I knew (which mostly comes from php, years ago). Adafruit provide a library to let you access the Dotstar leds, but it's pretty basic. That's cool, it was fun learning how to figure stuff out. I ended up using a couple of modules to generate colour gradients and to shift between various colourspaces. A nifty thing happened when I wanted to flash random, but bright colours as part of rave mode. Taking random RGB va...

Generally when joining metal I use sheet solder, which is economical and in most cases, easy and fast to use. But sometimes it can be a pain to get solder in place around a particularly tiny piece, so I thought I'd have a go with silver solder paste  instead. It's a bit more expensive but it lasts for ages. I'm starting out with a plain silver ring , to which I'm going to solder some silver and copper blobs. Blobby blobby blobby! OK, right. Here we go. Excuse my fingernails, I've been testing out gilding nails with copper leaf. It actually worked pretty well, this is a few days afterwards.. Dot punch to start with. Stops the drill skipping off the surface of the ring. Bzzzzzzzz. Only drill a bit into the surface, don't go all the way through. Repeat until lots of holes. This is fine silver casting grain, usually used for melting down prior to turning into other exciting stuff , but this shape is exactly what I want for this ring. Carefull...

I was asked about doing a tutorial on soldering. So here it is. Soldering is much easier than it looks - with a bit of practice you can be making bezels, joining bits of wire and much more. Main things to remember are clean joins and to heat the piece not the solder. Spending time getting everything nice and clean and properly in place before you get the blowtorch out is important. Notice how much time, even speeded up, I spend aligning the piece of silver in this video. I've heard the word "light-tight" used to check a joint is ready for soldering - if you can see air between the two bits of metal, your joint isn't lined up correctly. Some people say solder won't fill gaps, but it will. That's not an excuse to not having your joints line up though! This ring was only polished to about 800 grit (the  radial polishing discs  you see towards the end are awesome!) so it's still a little satin-y to look at. There's nothing to stop you polishing it al...

Wooden rings benefit from a good tough, protective coating both for visual appeal and to keep them safe from scratches and knocks. CA (superglue) is perfect for this. It dries very hard, very tough and super glossy. The process for finishing a ring is pretty easy. It's as simple as building a few layers on the ring, sanding flat and then polishing to a shine. The ring featured below only took ten minutes from start to finish, which is helped by using an accelerator spray on the CA, but even without that you can do the whole job in well under an hour. Before starting, the ring has been sanded to 1500 grit, dusted and cleaned with white spirit, then mounted on my turning jig (OK, OK, it's a power drill clamped to my bench - but it works!). This process can be used for metal rings too - a coat of CA will protect a gilded finish, or stop copper from tarnishing. For a change, I've made a video of the process rather than photos. Here we go, apologies in advance for dodgy ed...

As requested by someone on Reddit's wonderful /r/crafts subreddit, a short tutorial on gilding. Gilding is not as hard as you might expect, and with a simple beginner's kit , you can get going right away. I suggest purchasing an imitation leaf kit to start with, as messing up gilding aluminium is an awful lot cheaper than messing up with 24k gold leaf! OK, so here are a pair of rings waiting to be gilded. They were made as per the tutorial on making metal rings I did last week. One silver, one copper. One bright and mirror polished, one satin finish. They need to be clean, so no finishing polish or wax just yet. I'm going to use two different gilds on these, in two different styles - but your options are limited only by your skills with a brush and your imagination. Gilding, being an ancient art, has lots of lovely old language associated with it. Gilders don't use glue, they use size. It's basically just glue. I like to use a nice fine lining...