It’s a nice touch to engrave a heartfelt message on a wedding band, and my couples choose to do so. But you can say a lot more with a 20 second audio message. That’s exactly what [Luke Jerram] did by etching an audio track into this ring. He uses his custom-built hardware to playback the message, which you can see in the video after the break. The ring is an Edison Cylinder, which works just like a modern record player except that the media is on a spinning drum (the ring) instead of a rotating disk. We wonder if this would sound a bit better with a high-end cylinder player.

While you’re on [Luke's] page you might as well take a look at his image projecting ring as well. It has a color image slide on one side and a projection lens on the other. Wacky!

[Alan] acquired a stereo microscope from eBay, and decided to save some more money by designing, machining, and assembling his own arc reactor ring light to go along. After finding an LED driver board sitting around as well as ordering some surface mount LEDs, he set about using a lathe to cut away a block of lexan, making sure to include slots for the lights as well as the microscope mount point. Follow the link to see the detailed build photos, as well as some comparison shots with and without the ring light.

A month or two earlier though, and [Alan] would have had a fantastic start to an Iron Man costume.

De Beers would have you believe that only diamonds will do, but hackers are hardly ones to follow convention. How better to say “I love you” than with a MakerBot-extruded black ABS engagement ring? [Adam Elkins] did just that, creating the design with a combination of GIMP, SketchUp and Blender, then producing the final output on a MakerBot at Philadelpha hacker space Hive.

From the steampunk wedding at the 2008 Maker Faire, to the science-meets-romance web comic xkcd, hackers certainly have some unique ways of expressing their devotion. What are some of the wildest or most charming that you’ve seen? Comments are open…speak now or forever hold your peace.

Oh, and the engagement ring? She accepted. Congratulations to the lucky couple!

[via MakerBot blog]

Speaking of laser engraving, the blackbag blog announced that Toool has designed 2 unique picksets for The Last HOPE this year. First is the credit card sized snap-off set seen above. They have named this one The Last HOPE emergency pickset. The other pickset is a new version of the ‘double sided pick’ series. This set consists of picks with the same tool on either end, but they are sized differently. This set will contain 8 picks with promised improvements. If you are interested in more complex picks, check out the centipede.