Originally Posted by
GentaiShinigami
Just recently wandered onto these things, and am researching them really hard atm. Seem to have everything sorted, but have run into just a couple of problems. It would be nice if someone here has some experience with these and could shed a little light on them! Thanks in advance for your time and advice.
#1: I know they are a Mohs or ~9, and are very scratch resistant provided they are Tungsten Carbite, but are in turn very very brittle. What I'm concerned with is accidentally breaking the ring on something like a granite/quartz counter-top or accidentally dropping it onto the floor (tile seems the worst-case scenario). Scratches and shit aren't as huge of a concern. I mean sure a dollar store nail file with synthetic diamond on it will scratch it, but it'd own gold/platinum/silver just the same so does it really matter? XD I just don't want a ring that's going to break cause i slammed my hand down too hard.
#2: Tungstenworld.com so far is seeming like a pretty good place to go if I do decide to get a tungsten band. I've looked far and wide on the net and could only find one complaint (repeated on 3 sites I've never seen before), and one of the sites had a rebuttal claiming the site makes fake negative reviews and contacts the seller trying to basically extort them into signing up with the site to "manage" it's reputation. That honestly doesn't sound too unlikely lol. I figure if the site was so bad I wouldn't have to look so hard to find something negative, but I'd like to know if anyone here has any experience with them or has a better place at which to shop. The "problem" that was reported was that the ring was tarnishing into a very dark almost black color after several months of wear. Couldn't find any other reports really of it though, and to me it sounded like a cobalt-binder tungsten ring that had leeched and been permanently "stained". This website doesn't use cobalt for a binder though because of that and uses the more accepted nickel binder (though I've heard this does make it more brittle than cobalt would).
Thanks for any advice on the matter! If you have experience with any other non-traditional band materials I'd love to hear about them (ie, titanium, cobalt, palladium, carbon fiber etc).