Guide to Making a Ring With Sheet Wax

Tools

Tools for working with sheet wax are fairly basic.

1. Cutting tools (image 1)
   • Scissors or Cutting blade
   • (optional tool - Circle cutter)
2. heating tools (image 2)
   • Embossing heat tool or small hair dryer
   • (optional tool - butane torch / Alcohol touch)
3. Metal working tools (image 3)
   • look for tools with curve heads for smoothing, flat head for cutting, pointed end for working fine details. Most metal tools comes with 2 different head on each side. check your local hardware store
   • (optional tool - Electric waxer is a tool commonly used in the dental industry for carving dental wax for prosthetic teeth. It comes with it own metal tips an a controller for more constant heat supply
4. Wax material (image 4 ,5 & 6)
   • Sheet wax comes in a verity of sizes and colours green being the most common form jewellery tool suppliers
   • (Avoid getting hard wax as this will be hard to work with and require additional tools)
5. Ring size (image 7)
   • Any syndical object can be used to get the size of the finger ranging from Pens to wooden dowel
   • (optional tool) Ring gauge help determine the correct size of a person finger size. It has varying sizes from small to large

* SAFETY NOTE : Most of this tool are safe when handles properly so practise good safety habits

• Working in a wide clear area
• Never leave heating tools unsupervised
• Keep children away from work space area
• Keep Sharpe tool in secure container

Step 1: Prepping Wax

1. (image 1 & 2) Begin by using the cutting tool to cut wax sheet into strips.
   • (Depending on your desired result this can be thin or thick)
2. (image 3) Using your cylindrical object wrap your cut strips around it to create the ring circular shape
3. (image 4) Remove the wax and check if it is the desired size.

Step 2: Working With Tools

1. (image 1)The range of tool needed does not have to be big or complex. Often 4 to 5 decent tool is all that is required
2. we can see that a simple metal curve tool is similar to that of the more expensive electric waxer. (Image 2)
3. All that is required is a heat source as seen in (image 3). We can use an embossing heating tool to heat the metal tool we are using.

Step 3: Working the Wax

*Another useful tool that comes in handy are tweezer this allow to avoid using your fingers too much. As the heat from fingers can soften the sheet wax and leave undesired marks

1. (Image 1) Hold the wax in place firmly
2. (Image 2) Heat up your metal tool
3. (Image 3) Locate the two interesting part of the strip of wax that are not connected
4. (Image 4) Begin welding the two parts together by gently tap the heated metal tool on to the wax surface
   • Avoid leaving the heated tool on the wax for too long as this well melt the wax
   • Sheet wax is very sensitive to gently tap on and off
   • You can also work in a circular motion to evenly smooth out the surface
5. As you can see on (image 5) the two parts are now welded/connected togeather

Step 4: More Wax Working

1. We can also connect additional wax with the same technique as be for simply place the strip in the desired area and weld them together with heated tool as seen in (Image 1)
2. As you can see in (image 2) we can connect and add more wax to create the desired form
3. (image 3) here are some example of form that can be achieve with sheet wax. We can simply add new layer of wax to create form. Fold the sheet wax like origami paper to create complex shape or combine both to get different results.

Step 5: Sheet Wax Transformed

1. In image (1 & 2) you can see that the wax ring starts off as simple shapes and end up with a complex more refine form as we apply the techniques we learned before.
2. That result of (image 3 & 4) show that the sheet wax can be casted in metal (bronze) and turned into a solid result that can be used