John Easley: Composed in Composites

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John Easley

Composed in Composites

If you give an engineer a material, they will want to examine it. And figure it out. And maybe take it apart. And, in some cases, if you give an engineer a material, they will want to make a ring out of it. Particularly if they lost their wedding ring, like jeweler John Easley did about three years ago.

“I lost my wedding band, and wanted to make a replacement band that was meaningful,” he says. “I was studying to be a composites engineer at the time and learned about carbon fiber and a process called forged carbon, which was developed by Lamborghini around 2010. I liked the way it was made, with two materials that had strengths in different ways coming together under heat and pressure to become something stronger than they were separately. I thought that was a good symbol of my marriage—that we were better together.”

Setting out to understand carbon fiber and how it could be formed into a ring revealed that it wasn’t going to be simple. But even...