Zoom University Ring

After being kicked off campus in the spring and not being able to get our class rings at Ring Delivery, I decided to commemorate the semester by designing a ring for the Zoom University class of 2020 in the style of the MIT brass rat.

I designed the ring in Solidworks, which in hindsight is definitely not the program of choice for designing jewelry. While a modeling program like Rhino or ZBrush might have made the initial modeling easier, I wanted to use Solidworks so I could easily parametrize the ring with different bezel and ring sizes.

While getting the overall shape of the ring was not hard, transferring the designs from my vector editing software to the model was complicated and messy. It ended up being a mess of sketches, none of which parametrized particularly nicely. For my purposes though, this was fine since I planned on making them for myself in one ring size.

I printed them on a Form 2 in Grey resin during my internship at Formlabs, since we had access to printers for personal projects. I also made a couple in Castable Wax to investment cast in metal once I returned to campus.

I think the prints came out surprisingly well. The SLA printer was able to easily capture the vast majority of the small details on the ring, and an excessively long stint in the UV curing machine hopefully made it so they were safe to wear.