I bought some eyelets (hollow plugs for my pierced ears) and the guy at the shop said they were titanium. I thought titanium was fairly expensive to produce, so this took me by surprise. Also, based mostly on seeing bike frames made from ti, I thought that it always had a matte pinkish gray color to it. What I got has the look of stainless steel – shiny, silvery or chromed looking. Could titanium look like this, and could it be cheap enough to mass produce jewelry for the masses?
A guy I work with has a titanium wedding ring. It’s very light and looks like stainless steel, like you said.
From Wikipedia:
As should be obvious from the listed applications, by no means is titanium too expensive for use in “mass-produced” jewelry.
Here’s a link with pictures:
http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Elements/022/index.s7.html
As for pricing info, nothing to definite, but I am seeing $100/gram here and there. Could be way off.
Titanium is currently being used for major parts of some handguns, due to its high strength to weight ratio. It can’t be that expensive.
Titanium is often used to make body jewelry. It’s light and hypoallergic (or whatever the heck that word is).
You are. We’ve been around the price of titanium before:
Titanium sponge (the way the raw metal is sold as a commodity) is on the order of a few dollars a pound.
It’s expensive enough that it will be restricted to specialty uses, but it’s not a “precious metal”, per se, even though it is being used in jewelry a lot these days.
Titanium prices dropped like a rock about 15 years ago. Manufacturing technology made it a lot easier and cheaper to make. Opening the markets to Russia helped a lot. It’s a great source of hard currency for them.
I am working in my second consecutive machine shop that makes titanium medical products. Groovy things like bone screws and pacemaker parts. Three years ago 1/2 diameter commercially pure titanium rod (96%) was running at about $5.00 a pound. I’ve a chunk the size of a baseball on the bookshelf above my head right now.
My eyeglasses frames are titanium. Regarding bike frames or golf clubs you are almost always talking about an alloy. Mostly aluminum with vadinum and chrome as a stiffiner.
In its pure (ish) state it’s a dull grey and a real bastard to machine. Polishes up to a really nice mirror finish if you take your time and have the right equipment. It’s weight and strength vs. steel make it really cool to put in racing applications. My friends professional set up race motorcycle has titanium parts all over it.
Cheers **Mr. Goob. ** *who is tickled to death there is a GQ he really knows something about. *
If you made a knife blade of titanium how would it compare to a stainless steel blade re strength and edge holding ability?
I was getting Ti bicycle spokes for about $2.50 each 10 years ago. The prices had really come down.
Mr. Goob what does that baseball bat sized rod weigh? And what might one expect to pay for such a thing?
It’s not the price of the titanium itself - that’s relatively cheap. The real problem wth titanium for jewelry is that it’s just damned hard to work with. In this case, the softness of gold is a real advantage. A jeweler with a few hand tools can work gold, but titanium is a whole different story.
I suspect that’s why you can find things like titanium bands and studs and such, but you won’t find cheap titanium diamond settings and other intricate jewelry.
I had a pair of titanium eyeglass frames. I loved them–strong and light–until a solder failed. Of course, I was 30 miles from the closest LensCrafters, with no car, and no real pair of backups. And no one had the materials to solder them–working with titanium requires an inert atmosphere and pretty high heat.
I bought a couple titanium rings from overstock.com a few weeks ago for about hundred bucks total.
I have a spork made of titanium. It cost about $15.
At the moment, titanium is extracted using the Kroll process. The ore (eg rutile) is reacted with chlorine to form TiCl4. This is then reduced with sodium or magnesium to give titanium metal. The chloride is then recylcled.
A new process (FFC Cambridge process), which was reported a few years ago involves the direct electrolysis of titanium oxide. Carbon anode, TiO2 at the anode in a molten calcium chloride electrolyte. This is much cheaper and more simple, but the great thing is that alloys can be created simply by baking the oxides of the metals - eg aluminium and vanadium together with the rutile and use this oxide blend at the cathode to form the corresponding alloy.
that should be ."… Carbon anode, TiO2 at the **cathode ** in a molten calcium chloride electrolyte. …"
My wedding ring is titanium, (black titanium, I guess it’s anodized or whatever the equivilent is). It’s very light and very shiny.
It’s got a ‘replacement plan’, if you need it sized, they just send you a new one.
I think we could say that in general any material from which bike frames are made is cheap enough for jewelry.
I once knew a guy who ran a 2-man “boutique” machine shop. He specialized in titanium, and felt its reputation for being hard to work was a bit overdone. He claimed that the techniques were different - if you tried to machine it as if it were steel you’d have all sorts of problems, but by other methods it wasn’t too bad.
He said that Ti had roughly the strength of steel and the density of aluminum. Everyone knows of its performance at high temperatures, but it’s also about the least chemically reactive metal in widspread use.