Jewelry Meets Carpentry With Bentwood Rings



22 thoughts on “Jewelry Meets Carpentry With Bentwood Rings

    1. I’ve never had superglue NOT dry cloudy. If there’s some secret to using superglue on any material without it turning partially opaque, I’d love–not sarcasm–to hear about it.

      1. Use way, way more CA than you ever would if you weren’t sealing it. Use multiple coats of slow-drying CA (not gel) and smooth it with a paper towel while it cures. It actually works, believe it or not. Get a few exotic knife scale blanks from ebay and experiment.

        The paper towel may catch on fire.

      2. I turn wooden pens, and CA glue is a great finish for them. I use CA glue that requires activator. Spray in many coats, then sand down from 300 to 2000 grit. I finish off with a polishing compound buffed by pieces of paper towel. Clear finish that’s “almost optical”.

        1. Derp. my brain is off today. The glue is out of a squeeze bottle; the activator is the spray can. Like Brian wrote, use many coats, each quickly leveled while still liquid.

      3. Moisture and skin oils make super glue turn cloudy. Super glue fuming is used in forensics to reveal fingerprints on surfaces where powder won’t work.

        The discovery was accidental. Someone noticed white fingerprints on everything in a closet where cyanoacrylare resin was stored and found they were difficult to impossible to clean off.

        The discovery that cyanoacrylate resin made a super glue was also accidental. A plastics company was working on materials to make airplane windows from during WW2. One of their inventions was cyanoacrylate, but it proved to be useless for making windows, so it got tucked away with the reset of the failures. Some years later, a person at the company was doing optical tests on some prisms and went looking for something to get better coupling between them. He found a can of this clear stuff, spread it on the prisms and stuck them together. After doing the tests he couldn’t get them apart.

        He went to his supervisor to explain how he’d destroyed a very expensive instrument, but the supervisor said, no, you’ve discovered a glue.

        1. Part of the story you listed for super glue is true, it was found by accident during WWII. But, it actually was being used before the end of WWII as a type of field stitches for medics in the Army and Navy. My grandfather was a medic in WWII and he used it numerous times to do field stitches, almost like ‘New Skin’ or ‘DermaBond’, products created later on for the medical industry.

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