16 GAUGE BELLY BUTTON RING

Choose a modern look with this durable, lightweight titanium ring. The handsome 8mm band has a slightly domed shape with a brushed finish and brightly polished edges for contrast. Titanium is a great choice for anyone with metal sensitivities, or for those who don't like the weight of a heavy ring. It's completely hypoallergenic and offers superior lightweight strength and durability. This attractive, easy-to-care-for metal also maintains its color and won't yellow, fade, or tarnish over time.

I'm shooting Claire and Christopher's wedding next weekend. But before the wedding, they asked me to photograph Claire's ring. It's a stunning piece of art, a unique piece that perfectly suits them, and the story behind the ring is incredible. Christopher envisioned the ring he wanted to give Claire when he proposed to her. But the problem was he wanted to create a unique mount that would show off the beautiful red Padparadscha Sapphire he had gotten. Two different jewelers told him they couldn't make a ring that would safely hold the stone. So, he did what any creative engineer who works in a prototype lab would do, he made it himself. He created the design in CAD and then ran a finite element analysis to ensure the ring would produce exactly the right amount of force to safely hold the sapphire, and precision machined it out of titanium. I asked Chris for the CAD images and am posting them below. Amazing! Technique: Cleaned water marks in the recesses under the stone using a very small piece of wet paper towel. Rubbed the ring down to remove finger prints and handled with gloves to prevent adding any. Used blower brush to remove any dust. Used double sized clear tape to stick ring upright on white seamless paper. Used SB-800 in small softbox as single light. In Photoshop, removed tape and replaced with shadow and cleaned up some minor surface markings that you can see at this high magnification.

All sizes. Please. For the love of God.

I know now why people like Worlock don't turn out work at high rates. The differences between this and the first version are very small- but there are tons of them. I went truly all out on this one, about seven hours of shading and other modifications, and the result is, easily, my best-rendered gun to date.

Even though the basic structure is the same, the crazy amounts of tedious color work and shading details ARE noticeable. Especially when compared side by side to version 1.

Featured on this gun most prominently are the polished titanium suppressor and improved light perspective all around. I touched up the magazine, the buttplate, the sight, the charging handle, the charging handle groove, the cheekrest, the folding foregrip mount, the rails, the ejection port, the SPW logo and frame, and most of the screws and bolts (including indentations on the body.) Notice especially the effects on the "barrel" of the holosight and the shine on the suppressor. Getting the colors right was tough, and took about an hour to get just right. I might try to do a tutorial on them.

This is an example of about 99% effort. And it's also a good example of why it's usually good to move on after 85-90.... the seven hours of work today, polishing this thing, didn't go NEARLY as far as the hours on the first day did. But since I've got the time, brushing up my favorite SMG seemed an okay use of time.

Masterfully crafted and luxuriously simple in its design. A highly polished ring with shiny beveled edges, sporting a narrow ribbon of brushed satin through the center. Beautifully done. Timeless and elegant. It features a comfort fit design.
Tungsten is one of the hardest metals on the planet. It's durability is absolutely unmatched in the jewelry industry. Tungsten is 10 times harder than 18K gold, 5 times harder than tool steel and 4 times harder than titanium. It measures between an 8 and 9 on the Mohs scale, with diamonds being the highest at a 10. Tungsten has been used for decades in industrial applications where only the strongest and hardest metal will suffice. The incredible strength and timeless beauty of our tungsten rings will have you cherishing them for a lifetime.
All of our rings are manufactured with tungsten carbide using nickel as a binding agent. Many companies choose to use cobalt as a binder because it is slightly cheaper. While either element will work just fine, cobalt has a higher tendency to have adverse reactions with some people's skin. This is why we use nickel. Although in some extremely rare cases a customer will discover he or she has an allergy to nickel, our rings are generally considered to be hypo-allergenic.