Titanium Ring Resizing and Removal

Titanium Ring Resizing and Removal

Titanium Ring Removal - Can Titanium rings be removed in an emergency?

There seems to be a lot of myths and legends concerning this topic so I will try to put the record straight. Titanium is a material that is not particularly hard but is very strong and has a high tensile strength. Many people are unsure as to the difference between hardness and tensile strength and often get them confused. Let us consider diamond, the hardest material currently known to man. If you had a rod of diamond that was 25mm in diameter and 1 metre long, you wouldn't easily scratch it or mark it but if you try to bend it over your knee, you would probably find that it would snap like a carrot. Titanium on the other hand is relatively soft in as much as it can be easily cut and marked, but has a high tensile strength which means that if you put it over your knee and had the strength to bend it, it would bend without breaking. Tensile strength, in a nutshell, is resistance of a material to pulling force before it shears or pulls apart. Paper has low tensile strength, cake has very low tensile strength and Titanium and Titanium alloys have high tensile strength.

Incidently, just wandering off the path to smell a rose on a different dirt-track, an alloy, for those of you that don't know, is a combination of different materials. For example Aircraft grade Titanium (Grade 5 or Ti/6Al/4V) is an alloy of 90% Titanium, 6% Aluminium and 4% Vanadium and has higher tensile strength than Grade 2 CP Titanium which is not an alloy but the element in its pure form.

OK, back on the path again and back to the original question, 'Titanium Ring Removal - Can Titanium rings be removed in an emergency?'. The simple answer is 'yes they can' and the process is exactly the same as for precious metal ring removal utilising the same tools.

Titanium Ring Resizing - Can It Be Done?

This is a question that gets raised quite frequently. A lot of Titanium ring suppliers give a warning about taking care with getting the size right as it can't be altered in the future - this isn't strictly the case as it all depends on different factors.

Grade of Titanium

Is it diamond set?

Does it have a precious metal inlay?

Does it need to go up or down in size.

Whilst it isn't normally within the capabilities of a normal jeweller to do a quick resize, there is often various options that the manufacturer can take.

Grade 2 commercially pure Titanium is fairly ductile and will stretch and compress quite readily. If it has a precious metal inlay set into the outside it is probably better to take a skim out of the bore to make it bigger - stretching will normally cause the inlay to split. The amount of increase could be up to about two sizes. Compressing a ring with an inlay is usually ok for about one size. Compressing plain rings depends on the outside pattern. If it is patterned then the amount of force required to compress it will undoubtedly cause too much damage to repair the outer surface economically and so should be avoided. Plain domed or flat rings don't present much of a problem.

Higher tensile grades of titanium, such as aircraft grade Ti/6Al/4V (or grade 5 as it is also known) will not stretch or compress. The only option with these is to increase the ring size slightly by remachining the bore larger.

In many cases, especially with plain rings, due to the amount of refinishing required with resizing it is simpler to make a new ring. This isn't always an option, for example, when a ring has been bought as a wedding ring and has been personalised with engraving and blessed in church.

GETi are the only UK manufacturers that we know of who will even attempt to resize a Titanium ring of their own manufacture.