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At a little after 20:00 UTC on July 20, 1969, the most expensive endeavor in human history was in jeopardy of failure. With the planned landing zone full of boulders, a pilot switched his craft to manual navigation, choosing a secondary landing zone and guiding the vehicle to a safe descent. With only 25 seconds worth of fuel to spare, over 360,000 kilometers from home, Neil Armstrong spoke those famous words: “The Eagle has landed.” Over the next 21 hours, Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin explored the lunar surface, loping across an orb that had been the subject of wonder and worship since mankind first looked up to the sky. After collecting samples, deploying scientific instruments, and leaving behind mementos of five astronauts and cosmonauts who died in pursuit of space flight, the two boarded the lunar module and launched back into space to link up with the command module for their return home.

They came in peace for all mankind, but eventually one man was able to get a piece of that lunar module and turn it into something personal.

From Manufacturing Parts to Manufacturing Art

After years working at a shop manufacturing parts for bicycles, Ben Bosworth turned his hobby of making customized rings into a side hustle and eventually into his primary business. In 2021, he left his position to found Honest Hands Ring Co. in Morrison, Colorado, where he and a handful of coworkers-turned-employees use lathes, laser engravers and hand tools to produce customized rings using materials as varied as antlers, musical instruments and even a piece of Kapton foil from the Apollo lunar lander.

Kapton is a polymide material used in a variety of circuits. For the Apollo program, NASA used Kapton as a lightweight, reflective insulating material. When a customer approached Honest Hands with a piece of Kapton from the Apollo 11 lunar module he had won at auction, Bosworth’s team turned this piece of history into a piece of art. They first used a Logan table lathe to groove a zirconium ring blank, which they heat treated until it was black using a small system in the shop. They then ground up a piece of lunar meteorite obtained from Algeria and cut a thin strip of Kapton out of the sheet the customer had obtained, inlaying both materials. After a finishing pass on the lathe, the ring was ready.

Like every ring Bosworth and his employees make, this was a work of art, and with such detailed craftsmanship and a willingness to work with odd or rare materials, orders swiftly increased enough to challenge the small shop’s capacity. Bosworth and his team had to develop processes that simplify order fulfillment without overloading himself or his three employees with administrative duties. This led them to rely on  lean manufacturing and Kaizen practices learned from his time manufacturing bicycle parts.

The Complex Process of Simplifying Processes

With a shop small enough to fit inside a U-Haul, maximizing usable space was vital for Bosworth, but space was not his only concern. “We laid out the shop in a U shape,” he says, “and each ring works its way around the U from where we take orders to laser engraving, inlays, machining, etc., until it arrives at shipping at the end.” This leaves the middle of the shop floor open while making it clear which operations have been performed on each ring and how close they are to being complete. “It also keeps us from losing the rings,” he continues. “When your stock is this small, you need to be extra careful to keep track of it.”

One station includes order travelers, ring blanks in a variety of materials and a computer for designing the rings using CAD software. The person taking the order fills out the traveler with all necessary info, then pulls out the appropriate ring blank (customers are sent 3D-printed plastic ring-sizers to ensure the correct size), and puts both in a clear envelope to take to the next station. Blanks are kept in small plastic tackle trays, with each cube in the tray holding blanks of only one material and size. Each section also has an order card with the dimensions and material of the blanks for that section. When someone pulls out the last blank from a section of the tray, they file the order card in a “To-Order” slot to ensure that replacements get ordered ASAP. “We might eventually move to shop management software as we grow, but with three or four people this method is just as efficient,” Bosworth says. “I learned from my old machining job that you should always make your process simple enough that a grandma on third shift can handle it.”

The team also has a system in place for visually identifying jobs that need quick turnarounds, which is important when considering the customers. “You’re not going to find customers more distressed than someone who needs a wedding ring quickly,” Bosworth says. “Sometimes we get an order for a ring that’s needed in two weeks.” To ensure hot jobs get immediate attention, the team adds red or green tags to travelers to quickly convey the need for immediacy, with green tags used for rings that are needed quickly and red tags for rings that are needed now. Work on untagged rings does not begin until the tagged rings are taken care of.

These tags are part of Honest Hands’s dedication to the Kaizen method, using quick visual indicators to quickly convey information and help the team prioritize without adding excessive work. According to Bosworth, he learned this at his previous job at the bike shop. “This way, the simple tasks are accounted for, and we can focus our energy on actual value added to the customer,” he explains.

Adding Value

While there is a degree of standardization to the ring-making process, the company produces highly customized rings that require incredible craftsmanship. While most rings do not include pieces of American history, rings frequently include inlays of semiprecious stones, customized laser engravings from photographs, and feathers or antlers. “I don’t think anyone on Earth has put as much thought into accurately sawing antlers as I have,” Bosworth says. These materials can be difficult to work with, and the craftsmen work closely with customers to design rings that both meet the customers’ needs and fit the design aesthetic of the company.

Keeping the production process moving smoothly when individual rings require the attention of dedicated artisans is difficult, but Kaizen ideals again enable production to flow much smoother. A computer at the inlay station, for example, provides staff with easy access to images of how standard inlays should look, making regular quality checks simple. As rings move further down the line through turning, heat-treating and sandblasting stations, the traveler comes with them in the same bags that hold the rings. Each station is kept clean and free of clutter, with consumables like cutting tools kept in storage boxes with order cards similar to the ones used for ring blanks. When, for example, an employee needs to carefully grind up pieces of meteorite and slice into an irreplaceable artifact of mankind’s flight to the moon, it is vital that he does not need to waste time and energy looking for his tools or resin.

At the final station before shipping, each ring gets photographed for both the customer’s benefit and for advertising. The team’s photography method is clearly informed by their manufacturing experience, as jigs line up the ring in the miniature photo booth to take photos for each ring at the exact same angles, keeping consistency for marketing purposes. Camera arms are also placed at different stations, enabling the craftsmen to film themselves when working on particularly interesting rings to create videos for their YouTube channel, which helps them further market their rings. “We don’t want to have to waste time digging out a single camera rig,” Bosworth says, “So we make it easy to grab a camera and attach it to the arm on the wall and get back to work.”

While these marketing efforts are not necessarily directly applicable to most machine shops, understanding the needs of workers and investing in making it as simple as possible to accomplish their goals is certainly worthwhile for most manufacturers. I do not know of any other shop dedicating machine time to make a ring out of a piece of a famous spacecraft, but plenty of shops make parts that keep spacecraft in flight and guard the lives of the astronauts onboard. Every part is vital in its application, deserving the care and expertise that gets put into these rings, and lean organization can go a long way in giving workers the time to bring their skill to bear on the components that keep society moving and carry us to the stars.