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The Sexiest Metal
jonerik writes "Denver's weekly Westword magazine has this article on titanium and the attempts to break it out of its traditional aerospace/defense industry niche, including its growing use in architecture, computers, jewelry, sports, knives, cars, medicine, and other areas. The upside: It's as strong as steel but weighs half as much, it doesn't rust, and it's fairly plentiful. The downside: It's expensive compared to steel and aluminum and its high melting point makes it difficult to work with under some conditions. Still, it's nice to see it being used in other applications." Heck, I know someone who used it as his wedding ring. Pretty cool, actually.
www.tirings.com carries some great rings. They seem to be the only ones making highly polished ti rings. I'm hoping my fiancee gices me the go-ahead to get one. She unfortunatley has a hang-up about our rings not matching.
I think the blue titanium oxide looks great. I have questions about the oxides durability in the long run. Fortunatley I don't have to think about the rings durability.
Does anyone out there have one of these?
pending committee review
I shattered my wrist a couple years ago, and theybolted a titanium plate to the bone in my wrist. The doctors said it is supposed to stay inside me for the rest of my life. They explained that the lightweight metal was especially well-suited for this purpose, because of it's strength/weight ratio.
My only complaint is it aches after a hot shower or bath, anyone have any scientific reason for why this would be?
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
Back in USSR, for a given quantity of alchohol, you could get pretty neat titanium ware. We had titanium hiking gear such as ovens, climbing hooks, portable shovels, etc. They were considerably better in most ways. Later, in the mid-90s, some "businessmen" were selling bike frames made out of pure titanum. A friend of mine still rides one of those - doesn't rust and very light.
that titanium (or an alloy of it) is used
I remember somethign from high school science class about plain old titanium being quite brittle, you can actually crumble titanium ore with your hands. The only thing that makes it twice as strong as steel is making an alloy out of it with some other metal(s). The thing I never found out is: what other metals do you mix it with to make the alloy?
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
Ti is also what was used to cover the new guggenheim in bilbao, spain. Frank Gehry is a genius. originally he was going to use stainless steel. but it didn't catch the light quite the right way. then he saw titanium and was sold. he was worried that it costs 2x as much as stainless, but it was ok because it only had to be 1/2 as thick.
i love the total lack of right angles in that building. simply beautiful.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
Wearing a ti ring is bad if you ever get injured and your finger swells. Most ER's are not capable of cutting through ti and as a result, you could be in a lot of trouble if you ever need to have it taken off.
TRUTH :Titanium popular only because of discovery in 1998 on how to CHEAPLY make titanium.
Basically titanium dioxide (a common white powder used in paint and found all over this planet) was found in an amazing discovery to be able to be turned into pure titanium by dipping it in a hot salt and using electricity.
The titanium dioxide is shaped into a cathode in a fused salt cell and under an applied current, the oxygen leaves the oxide as oxygen ions, diffuses to the anode, where it is discharged. The titanium metal is simply left behind and at no stage in the process is the titanium in the liquid or ionised state. This is the major difference with the previous processes. Furthermore, as the titanium is not deposited from the salt, it is relatively inert. Another very surprising observation was that although titanium dioxide is an insulator, it acts as an efficient cathode. The reason for this is that as soon as a minute amount of oxygen is removed, the material becomes an electronic conductor that allows the electrochemical processes to take place. The overall process is that an insulating oxide is made the cathode in an electrochemical cell and the oxygen is extracted to leave pure titanium.
Its a miraculous discovery and though now titanium is dirt cheap... it is still unworkable into finished products. This makes it expensive because machining it is difficult.
It used to be that the material was expensive.
Apple rushed into the fray first with its use of titanium on its flagship computer products.
I wish people would stop acting like titanium is sexy and hot merely because of a fashion fad... its current popularity is soley based on an amazing discovery.
I HAD to get titanium frames on my glasses, because my sweat is so acidic. The other glasses I used to wear when I worked out had some type of metal that was pulverized after one year of sweat exposure. The titanium looks just like new, after almost two years. Did I mention they are light. :)
Yeah, we got titanium rings for our wedding.
:(.
It had 'platinum' inlays. After a couple of days my wife got a rash. Now, she wears a titanium watch all the time, so she's not alergic to that. She also has been wearing the platinum engagement ring for several months, so she's not alergic to that either. She is however alergic to tons of other metals, like white gold (or the nickel they use in it).
When she contacted the company, all they said was, ok, return them, insisting that it was real titanium & platinum. To be fair,- they did refund us promptly, but the ease at which they did it makes me suspicious.
What I'm trying to say is, how do you know for sure that things are actually made of the material you are paying for? I guess especially when you buy stuff online it's pretty risky.
And it kind of sucks to have to return your wedding rings
Anyone here welded titanium? I wasn't a welder in the Air Force, and it was a long, long time ago, but IIRC the metal shop had to drag out all sorts of gear if welding Ti was necessary. I think you have to flood the weld area with nitrogen because its ignition temperature in air is lower than the melting temperature. Of course, you need something much hotter than the normal welding torch. Then you get the weld done and need to grind down the excess bead -- and as hard as Ti is, that's going to take some time.
But it's mighty durable once it's together.
My dad had to have his ring resized back in the late 70s and I went with him to the jewelers. His ring finger had swollen substantially over time and his ring had become quite uncomfortable.
To remove it the jeweler had a tool with a flat bit that slid between the ring and the finger and had a cutting wheel (like a dremel cutting disk) that cut through the ring. The bit that slid under the ring was aligned with the cutting wheel so that when you went through the ring you didn't start cutting flesh.
The ring was then resized and re-fused to be a continuous ring. I'd guess that cutting is a last resort and that cut rings might have been resized by actually adding material to make them bigger rather than just stretching them.
IIRC the cutting part was hand actuated, but with the safety "backstop" I see no reason other than heat that it couldn't be mechanically operated.
I have Titanium silverware.
I got a set of Ti sporks, great for pasta and anything with rice or slippery seafood in it.
Actually, they did use steel for another Mach 3 jet, the Russian Mig 25, but it paid the price in lots of extra weight and slow acceleration. Aluminum can only go up to Mach 2.5 before the heat from air resistance weakens the material. Steel and titanium can take higher temperatures.
When I did volunteer EMS in rural NJ, we had this thing in our rig called a 'ring remover'. It removed rings with a little saw blade, and it was nigh impossible to damage the patient's finger with the cutter. Ti was on the list of metals that it would cut. So I wouldn't be *that* worried.
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
One other neat application of Ti is TiO2 coating glass and other surfaces. The TiO2, when exposed to UV light (like sunlight) causes a catalytic reaction oxidizing anything on the surface.
O 2+UV+surfa ce+treatment">here's a link to some pages on Google.
Car windows treated with TiO2 on the outside would literally burn off the gunk that gets on them (insects, bird splats, hydrocarbon grunge) in the sunlight, staying clean.
There has even been talk of using this in medical surfaces (exam tables and O.R.s) - when you are done, flood the area with some UV and burn the microbes off the surface.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Ti
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www.eFax.com are spammers
This is true, what they call a tension setting is really a compression setting - I never really gave any thought to it before. I've made a number of compression settings (still called tension setting on my web page), but my newest sample is a reverse compression setting where the metal crosses under the stone and comes up to hold the sides. To set the stone I compress the ring instead of expanding the ring as with the other compression settings. I'll have it pictured on the next update of the site - http://www.ti-designs.com