I recently experimented with making some rings on the lathe as gifts. The current process is pretty simple and has yielded some great results!

I drew up some rough CAD files to eyeball dimensions, then headed over to the CNC lathe to get the outer profile machined. Programming went pretty slow at first because I forgot how to use cycles (you define what you want the part to look like after machining and what the part currently looks like). After finding a stupid error wherein the machine kept trying to rapid through the material (shown below), I was ready to go!

Silly program tried to rapid through the part - look at the uppermost, horizontal red line.

As for the machining, check out this video for the CNC lathing. Afterwards, I went over the the manual lathe to wrap things up - it’s way easier to do a lot of drilling and polishing on the smaller lathe. The rest of the process involved drilling and boring out the interior (video here), then using a pneumatic dremel to round the interior, parting off, and a lot of polishing.

After parting off, I needed some more sketchy fixturing to face off the burr and finish the other side.

Sketchy fixturing!

The final product ended up looking way better than expected!

So shiny!