This is the 5 Best Tips for a Making a Laminated Wood Ring. This post, I’ll share several great ideas with you about making laminated rings, and how this classic wooden ring design can help you make better looking rings.

Laminated Wood Rings

Laminated wood rings are the bread-and-butter of ring making. Not only are they easy to make, but since they rely on combinations of wood for their look, the number of these rings that you can make is basically endless.

The process is fairly simple, and it just involves gluing together several pieces of wood into a short stack that is in drilled in shape to make a ring. The different colors and looks of the wood are what create the final design and appearance of the laminated ring.

Though the process is fairly straightforward, there are a few different tips that can help you along the way, especially as a beginner. I’ll show you everything you need to know coming up.

See Also: 6 Classic Wooden Ring Designs

Test Lots of Designs First

When making laminated rings, one of the best things you can do in the beginning is test a lot of different looks without using any glue. All you need to do is grab a bunch of pieces and stack them up together to create blanks.

Look at them from the edge, and it will be really easy for you to determine what the final look would be if you were to glue up this stack and turn it into a ring.

Keep on doing this, and really spend some time observing of what the different stacks look like. It’s through creating these different stacks of wood and making rings from them that you really showcase the range of laminated rings.

When you find some particular stacks that you like, write down the color combinations as well as the wood species, and what order they are stacked in. This way, you can go back and re-create these looks any time you like.

See Also: 11 Easy Tips on How to Texture Your Wooden Rings

Use Different Sizes in Your Layers

Another thing that’s important to remember is that you don’t need to use pieces of wood that are all the same thickness. In contrast, using wood of different sizes actually makes a big difference when it comes to creating a great looking lamination.

It’s a good idea to use pieces that range from 1/16 of an inch up to about 1/2 an inch, ascending in increments of 1/16 inch. This gives you a lot of range to work with, and you can create different layer designs that work together tremendously.

Using different thicknesses also gives you a lot more range that you would not have if you were stuck using only one size of wood. You can go all the way down to veneer if you want, and sometimes a thin line of color can make a big difference in a laminated ring.

See Also: 25 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Making Wooden Rings

Fatten Your Pieces Before Gluing

Once you’ve discovered all of the different amazing looks that you can make with wood lamination, it’s time to learn about gluing up these blanks. The very first thing that you need to do is flatten all of your pieces before you glue them into a stack.

This is a very important part of the process, and it’s definitely something that you shouldn’t skip. Pieces of wood that are not flat will not glue together well, and that results in gaps and weak points.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your pieces of wood are, if there are large gaps ad pockets of glue showing, the resulting ring will not look good. Instead, simply take some time to sand the faces of your different pieces flat before you glue them together.

If you are using smaller pieces of wood, you can lay a piece of sandpaper face up on a flat surface, and just slide around each one of the pieces until the faces are flat. It’s going to take an extra few minutes, but it will definitely be worth it in the final lamination.

See Also: How to Make Wooden Rings Without a Lathe

Use the Best Wood Glue

After you have all the pieces completely flat, and they are ready to be glued together, you need to decide right now not to use a bottom shelf wood glue. Besides, the top shelf wood glue doesn’t really cost that much more anyway.

Instead of trusting this project to just any old wood glue, I recommend that you use Titebond original wood glue in the red bottle. This stuff has a very long track record, and has been trusted by millions of woodworkers before you.

Don’t even waste any time on researching wood glue. Just use Titebond, and you won’t have to worry at all about any of your wood to wood joints.

When you glue your stack of pieces together, lightly coat both mating faces with glue on every joint, and then press the stack together evenly with clamps.

See Also: Essential Wooden Ring Making Tools List

Clamp Evenly With Medium Pressure

When you clamp your laminated wooden ring blanks together, it’s more important to use even pressure than it is to use high pressure. In reality, it really doesn’t take that much pressure to hold the pieces together while the glue dries.

For starters, don’t hose your piece with glue. You only need a couple thin layers on both faces that will meet together in the joint. If you have three pieces, then you’ll have four faces that you need to coat with glue.

Bring your stack together, and apply two clamps, though you can use up to four depending on the size of your blank, and place them evenly. Bring up the pressure to the median range, but make sure that the pressure stays even all the way around the piece.

Don’t apply so much pressure that all of the glue squeezes out. You should have a little squeeze out, which is indicative of a good joint, but you definitely don’t want to press all of it out of the joints.

Put the piece aside for a while, and in 24 hours you should have a very solid ring blank without any gaps, and with a good design. You can then drill your finger hole, and start making a beautiful looking laminated wood ring.

See Also: Complex Laminated Ring

Your Action Assignment

Now that you know these great tips for making laminated wooden rings, it’s time to get out into your shop and take action on what you’ve learned. Rings are a fun woodworking project, and you can see results almost immediately.

Ring making is also a great side project because the pieces you need are so small that you can typically use scraps from some of your bigger projects. It’s allows you to be more efficient and you have a lot less waste from your shop.

If you have any questions on making laminated wooden rings, please post a question and I’ll be glad to answer them. Happy building.

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