A friend’s picture of his family’s fire pit with their surname cut out of the fire ring prompted this project. I found an SVG of the inscription of the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings series, based on Tolkien’s depiction in The Fellowship of the Ring (source). I cleaned up the file and put in bridges to the islands using a macro I created in CorelDRAW. I then used the laser to cut it out of an 8″x72″ piece of 14-gauge hot-rolled steel sheet, rolled it, and welded the ends together. I also cut out a circle of the same diameter, forced it inside the ring sitting a half-inch from the bottom, welded it in place, and welded on three black-iron pipe flanges to attach removable legs.

(An astute observer might notice and question the chalk arrows in the above picture. The laser got defocused during cutting due to buildup on the nozzle affecting the automatic height tracking, so I had to make a second pass of some sections. I then discovered that the piece had shifted slightly and some of the bridges were much narrower than I would have liked, so the arrows mark places where I later welded on some bridges. )