My wife and I cast our own wedding bands too. She mentioned the idea of casting our own rings, and I remembered my friend happened to have made his own small fo

My wife and I cast our own wedding bands too. She mentioned the idea of casting our own rings, and I remembered my friend happened to have made his own small foundry — a concrete lined paint can with some pipe and 10$ hair drier as bellows — a couple of years prior. We bought some sand casting equipment and a thermometer and went over to his house. He had only ever used the foundry to melt aluminum, so we weren't sure it'd get hot enough to melt gold. We stuffed it with anthracite coal from a big bag he managed to get from a hardware store a while back, and sure enough, it got plenty hot enough. That 10$ hair drier really pulled its weight too, surviving hours upon hours of continuous use. Before we bought any gold though, we did some test casts in aluminum. My wife, I, and a couple of friends melted down some cans, formed our sand molds with some cheap steel model rings, and cast some pretty bad rings. They weren't even rings, really, since they didn't even form full circles. But after a few more tries, we figured out better places to put air channels, how to pour the metal better, etc. and came out with some decent aluminum rings. We also cast some other trinkets like some dice and a little darth vader figurine. More confident we'd be able to successfully cast gold rings, we ordered some 14k casting grain. When it arrived, we headed back to my friends house, cast some more aluminum trinkets to warm up, then my wife and I cast each others rings with only one small mishap; luckily gold can is easily re-melted. Breaking apart the sand molds to reveal the results was a tense moment, but they came out great. We also opted for hammer finishes, and we're both very happy with the result. They have some small pockets on the surface, and we overestimated how much the rings would shrink, so mine's a little too big and I wear it on my middle finger, but we think of the defects as reminders we cast them ourselves. The end result wasn't the point anyway; if we wanted perfect rings we would have just bought some. The point was the experience of making them, and it sounds like the author had the same kind of experience, so I'm glad for him.