My husband and I have matching titanium bands from Titanium Era. They were $55 each since we just got the basic dome shape. I love how it’s just so lightweight because I don’t ever take it off. I don’t even notice it most of the time. I was looking at a ring my sister had the other day, and it was so heavy in comparison to my ring. I totally love my ring.
Mine looks a lot like #19. Love it.
TC is hard like The One Ring. It’s like an 8.5-9.0 hardness (diamond is a 10). Prolly not going to be getting scratched up.
Mine’s titanium. It’s pretty lightweight (if you didn’t know any better, you 'd guess it was aluminum) and durable. I like it. Plus it was about 100x cheaper than my wife’s.
I have a titanium wedding band and the only downside in 4 years is that I just discovered it can scratch porcelain.
Discovered only after cleaning my downstairs bathroom sink and leaving a 12" scratch right across it.
Huh. What am I doing wrong with my tungsten ring? It’s only 3 months old and scratched all to hell. I was expecting that but I’m surprised to hear that about others’.
Tungsten by itself is only 7 to 7.5 hardness*. Steel can be up to 6.5, Quartz is 7 and is a key component in granites. In other words, there’s plenty of stuff in the environment that you could be rubbing it up against that would scratch it.
Tungsten carbide is way harder.
*Mohs hardness scale
I too, am the kind of guy who needs something pretty tough. I have destroyed every piece of jewelry I have ever worn on my hands.
So a while ago, I was musing over some wikipedia articles about materials with unusual properties, and I came across rhenium diboride. It’s a metal-like substance with a higher mohs value (i.e. harder) than diamond. It was discovered in the last few years, and there was a lot of excitement because apparently, the process to create it in the lab is particularly cheap. The rhenium metal required to make it, however, is somewhere between gold and platinum in terms of rarity and price.
I saw all that and thought, “Hm. Precious metal. Unusual hardness. Sounds like it would be the perfect wedding ring for me someday!”
Anyone know if this is feasible, or would I have to donate several million dollars to a research institution before I could even begin to think about it?
(Sorry if this is too much of a hijack.)
Our wedding set is titanium. My wife’s engagement ring is titanium and diamond, and I wear a titanium band on my right ring finger and thumb.
Why yes, I am quite a fan of titanium rings, now that you mention it.
Both our wedding rings are titanium bands with a silver inlay. I am tough on jewelry and almost never remove my rings, plus I’m allergic to white gold, and allergic to the price of platinum, and think yellow gold looks ugly so… Huzzah for Titanium!
we bought our rings at www.titaniumconcepts.com.
Our wedding rings are titanium, with a black coating.
This is what ours look like.. I know nothing of this seller, I just wanted the picture.
I think the tungsten carbide ones are beautiful. We might be getting new rings at some point (at $175 for the pair, we can afford another set!) and I think we’ll go tungsten.
I am a guy who never wore jewelry. I do like my tungsten carbide wedding band. It looks cool and it never gets scratched. After wearing it for a while, it does get smudged till it gets a bit of a steely bluish color to it, but it still looks cool. If you brush it with soap and water, it looks as new as the day you got it. It’s only downside is that it is heavy and so there is a possibility of it slipping down your finger when your hands are wet or oily and you are carrying things or throwing things (especially if you go for one of those interior rounded “comfort fit” rings). I bought mine at one of the mall stores (Kays maybe), I really needed to see and try on a variety to compare.
Fascinating, Captain. I suppose some form of casting/sintering ala tungsten carbide would work, but what would suffice to polish? Diamond effective on WC would be akin to wood cutting wood.
I think nobody makes rings of just tungsten. For one thing, it oxidizes to form a dark gray powdery coating that rubs off.
As far as I know, all the rings referred to as “tungsten” are tungsten carbide.
Titanium is a different matter. Like platinum and gold, it is pretty corrosion and oxidation resistant (so is silver with the exception of the halides that tarnish it). Titanium is also quite strong and hard on its own, but most things nominally made of titanium are made of alloys also having aluminum, vanadium or maybe other metals in them.
We went with a titanium band with platinum stripes for my husband. It was about $450, but he loves it. It looks similar to this:
I change my wedding rings just about yearly - not my engagement ring, but the bands I wear with it…
I have had a titanium wedding band for 9 years. Mine has a notch in it specifically to make it easier to cut off if needed. They were pretty rare back then, so maybe they figure places are equipped to remove them now, since none of the ones on the OP’s link have notches.
The current hardest material in the world called “aggregated diamond nanorods” is not that attractive.
I have a couple titanium rings, at least I thought they were titanium, but they both are scratched up. I got them from overstock.com. Is the fact that they are scratched evidence that I got ripped off? I don’t recall how much I paid for them, it was like 5 years ago I got them.
Titanium is pretty hard, but will scratch. Tungsten Carbide is considerably harder.
>at least I thought they were titanium, but they both are scratched up
Titanium is quite hard and strong, but so is steel. I think they are roughly comparable in these ways (though titanium is much more resistant to oxidation and corrosion, and noticeably lighter). I think you could scratch something like this if you wear it all the time. There are various common minerals and abrasives and other materials that would be able to scratch titanium. I don’t think their being scratched necessarily means they aren’t really titanium. And though I’m not sure, I would expect them to scratch much more easily than tungsten carbide.
Titanium can get scratched. My ring has some light scratches on it that show up because of the polished finish. I would expect some scratching after 5 years. If it is seriously scratched maybe you did get ripped off.
This is what the company I bought my ring from has to say:
You could take it to a jeweler to see if they could polish it up a bit.