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Ok, folks, this was too cool a project not to share. This nice lady had a 15thC bronze ring with no stone, and she wants to wear it again. It used to have a roughly rectangular cabochon stone and was gilt. Here's the ring before I did anything to it but brush the dust off:


I dug around in my box of ill-advised gem show purchases and found a rectangular garnet cab a bit bigger than I needed. I took it over to Sam's house, and he showed me how to grind it down to the size I wanted and polish it up. Not too difficult when you have the right equipment, as he has. The ring was rather badly corroded, with pitting almost a millimeter deep in spots. I decided to burnish it before polishing to preserve as much of the original metal as possible. I knew it would never be perfect, but in this case preserving the original was more important. Here it is after burnishing:



Then I polished it carefully and set the garnet in the old bezel. This is the ring with the garnet in. My crap photography doesn't capture the stone color, but in this one the rather coppery tone of the bronze is pretty close to accurate.



I have sent it off to the plating pro and should have it back later this week. Woot! The ther bit of progress is a new ring. I've been wanting to do one like this for years, and our own dear joeguppy sent me a photo of a cool original ring, which I then had to go and make. Here's my wax, which I hope to have metal multiples of for Pennsic:



We shall see if I get that Renaissance ring wax done tomorrow. This is really the absolute last minute. I think if it weren't for the last minute, I wouldn't get anything done.