Wedding Band Rant

Tungsten Carbide Wedding Band

Our goals for our wedding bands was to have them fabricated out of really cool engineering materials, the more exotic the better, and preferably custom machined. After searching for a few hours at the mall, I got Mark this incredibly cool tungsten-carbide ring with a brushed metal center stripe, similar to the one pictured above. I, however, was not so lucky. There are no interesting metal choices available for women. Apparently, women are not interested in functional metal alloys, but are more attracted to shiny things. The only options available to me were gold, or platinum, hopefully with diamonds inlaid.

First, a discussion of why tungsten-carbide is so cool. It is really, really hard (75-80 Rockwell C) and is therefore, for all intensive purposes, unscratchable. It's strength and hardness make it ideal for use as end-mills for machining other metals.

Tungsten Carbide End Mills

It was really important for me to have something other than gold or platinum as a wedding ring. I have an extreme metal sensitivity. My platinum engagement ring has been giving me blisters. Even my watch's stainless steel band has been giving me a rash. I also want a ring made from a functional metal alloy, because it states something about who I am: a somewhat iconoclastic person, and also a female with a desire for function and technical detail.

Finally, after visiting jewelry store after store, I began to realize there was a bias against providing women functional metal choices. Jewelers don't think women are interested in having tungsten carbide, or titanium rings. Jewelers think women are interested in buying the rarest metals possible. That all we care about is what prestige we will earn amongst our friends. At the Bailey Banks and Biddles jewelry store, the saleswoman literally sneered when I asked her if she had titanium rings. She said, "We don't carry that stuff, only gold and platinum."

I got this titanium alloy wedding band

When I came home, however, I searched online and found myself an aircraft grade titanium alloy wedding band sized for women's fingers. The exact model of what I bought can be seen above. The cost? $65. The mechanical properties for the aircraft grade Titanium 6Al 4V alloy comprising this ring can be seen in the table below. It's hardness and strength properties make it very similar to half hard 302 stainless steel. In the real world, I believe this makes it comparable to 18-8 or 18-10 stainless steel cutlery (I heard that 18-8,18-10 is an antiquated term for 300 series stainless steel). However, the titanium is far lighter than steel, which makes it a very desirable property to have for making aircraft components, or for manufacturing bicycles.

This Litespeed bike frame is made entirely of titanium

Still, I think I would have preferred to custom machine my own wedding band. My immediate choice would have been to machine it out of annealed 420 SS and then harden it to 55 Rockwell C. This particular brand of stainless steel is so hard, it is used to make surgical scalpels and other surgical tools. As you can see from the table above, it is not quite as hard as tungsten carbide, but edges over the tungsten-carbide in terms of ultimate tensile strength. It would have made a nice complement to Mark's ring. But I am not complaining. My titanium ring is a whole lot more hypoallergenic.