Another one bites the dust

Oh well, so much for that idea.

Resizing a ring to be larger isn’t too hard—you’re basically stretching it, tapping it down over a long iron cone. Resizing it smaller is harder—they cut out a chunk and solder it back together. Why not squeeze it? Wild idea: use a hot mold with a hole for the ring; the cold ring snugly fit in the hole; the mold cools and squeezes the ring. Bingo, smaller ring. Except…

Unless the shape of the mold matched the shape of the outside of the ring, you’d tend to flatten it, which is probably not what you want. And it turns out that the squeezing is really rather small: you’d need about 10 differently sized molds to reduce a 20mm ring by 0.5mm.

So: this is doable with latch-able molds, provided you have a small furnace and that all the rings you deal with are the same shape; but it’s labor-intensive and you’d need a lot of molds.

Yes, I finally lost some of the weight. Why do you ask?