Making a Circular Titanium Pendant

The gold has to cover the titanium, so I first make some gold tubing.

The titanium is on the left and the strip of 18 ct gold in 0.7 mm thick

Bent the metal around a mandrel in my swage block.

Once the tube is soldered closed I insert the titanium rod

Then I roll the on end in my rollers.
This causes the gold to clamp the titanium and so it's a good place to grip the piece when it is being drawn through the draw plate.

I have a free tutorial on how to make a simple draw bench here.

The wire must be drawn down until it starts to spread along the titanium.
Because the titanium is so much harder than the gold, the gold tends to deform more than the titanium.
So if the wire is drawn too much, the gold will eventually be longer than the titanium rod.

Here is a cross section showing the gold at about 0.6 mm thick.

Now I bend a circle out of the composite wire.
Because I will be soldering the two ends closed, I first use a ball frazer to hollow out the titanium on each end.
This is so that the gold solder will flow easily, because titanium will not solder with normal oxygen/propane torches.

Once the circle is soldered closed it is put onto a triblet and bashed round.

Then the one side of the circle is filed down flat.
This starts exposing the titanium.

In the meantime, I also make a white gold bezel setting for the aquamarine.

The stone will be sunk into the tube and the edges of the metal will be folded over it.

The top of the circle is filed down until a nice looking balance between gold and titanium is reached.
The white gold tube is soldered onto two pieces of gold that will have the rubies and sapphires set in them.

About to be soldered in.
One this about soldering on a gold and titanium combination like this is that one can absolutely not quench the piece hot into pickle or water.
I let the air cool and the put them into pickle.
That way no water or pickle is drawn in between the titanium and gold.

Soldering on the bail and drilling the holes for the pavé stones.
Again, after the bail was soldered in, the piece was air cooled before pickling.

The stones are set.
Now everything gets polished and then the titanium center part is textured with a 0.7 mm ball frazer.