Tungsten Wedding Bands: How Are They Made?

Anyone who’s in the market for rings naturally wants to discover how exactly they are made – specially when the ring you’ll be slipping onto your fingers are marketed as the strongest rings anywhere. The groundbreaking process of molding the hardest of metals to create breathtaking wedding rings require similarly groundbreaking machinery and technique. If you know how the wonderful masterpieces such as tungsten wedding bands are made, then you’ll surely appreciate the beauty of the ring even more.

Basically, creating the tungsten wedding bands includes a 3-stage process:

Creating the Tungsten Wedding Ring Blank

Pure tungsten metal and carbon are combined to create tungsten carbide, an alloy second only to diamonds in hardness. Tungsten and carbon are ground to a very fine powder which is then placed inside a mold in the shape of the tungsten wedding bands that is to be created. The mixture is then compressed in the mold and heated to about 1400⁰C (as hot as a blowtorch!) in a vacuum furnace. This process is done to bind tungsten with the carbon to form the tungsten carbide alloy. In metallurgy, this process is known as sintering. The resulting band is known as a ring blank.

Polishing the Blank

The ring blank is a rough and black band of tungsten carbide alloy. Before the glossy shine that we see in rings on jewelry store displays are achieved, the blank will undergo at least 30 different steps of polishing. Though the same polishing machines used for the softer gold and silver is used in tungsten wedding bands, the polishing paste used is the same one used in diamond polishing. This is due to the fact that no other substance, other than a diamond, can readily scratch, much more polish, tungsten carbide alloys. The diamond polishing paste used starts at 80 microns which is then reduced for each polishing step all to achieve the mirror-like polish finish of most tungsten wedding bands.

Satin or Matte Finish

If the desired tungsten wedding bands have a satin, brushed or matte finish, then another finishing process needs to be undertaken. In this process, diamond coated wheels or discs are used. Once more, using diamond coating is necessary because tungsten carbide has a hardness of 9.5 on the Mohs Scale. With a diamond having a hardness of 10, coating the polishing disc or wheel with diamonds is necessary. 

Once the finishing is done, the products are very elegant and glossy tungsten wedding bands.  

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Created on Nov 17th 2018 09:18. Viewed 361 times.

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