I’ve got an upcoming (simple, very low-key) wedding and managed to put off getting a ring until the last moment (shoppings for jewelry is not really on my top 10 list). So I had pretty simple requirements; 1) silvery (which, since platinum is too expensive and you have to baby silver, I thought meant white gold), 2) affordable (over $400 really started me thinking about how much better other toys or travel sounded), 3) some sort of pattern or carving so it wasn’t just a boring band and 4) available within a couple weeks (me procrastinate?). After looking at about ten or so local jewelry shops, I was starting to get pretty depressed. Most of the rings were boring or really didn’t seem to look right (e.g. diamonds) and the few that I took a shine to either would take a month or more to resize\/order or were way outside of what I felt like paying. Once I started running into the same rings in different shops (always suspiciously identically 50% off), I decided it was time to see what the internet had to offer.<\/p>\r\n
After a bunch of googling, the online shops also seemed pretty generic and boring (although a bit cheaper). Then I started noticing the “alternative” metal rings. Apparently, rings made of silverish titanium or tungsten are gaining in popularity. Titanium is harder, lighter and a lot cheaper than gold and tungsten is apparently unscratchably hard (but shatterable) and a bit cheaper than gold. Having a ring made out of a cool metal instead of sissy precious metals sounded pretty cool (although maybe just a touch of classy metals might be good). But again a lot of the rings seemed sort of boring and\/or expensive. The tungsten rings especially seem to have few choices and none with any good patterns or carving (I guess because they’re so hard to cut).<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Then I found Boone Rings<\/a>. Apparently a guy down in Georgia used to make titanium bike parts but decided to take his knowledge of titanium (and CNC machine) and switch to making rings. From his website, you can pick from about a hundred ring styles and then pick what metals to include in the ring, what curvature and width to make the ring and what sort of polish to finish the ring with. The idea of designing my own ring sounded pretty cool and a few of the various polishes<\/a> seemed to scratch my itch for a pattern on the ring. So many choices led to analysis paralysis but I finally ended up deciding on a peened ring with palladium (pretty cool sounding fancy silverish metal) and white gold inlays. I also ordered a smaller peened white gold inlay one for the fiancee since she’s always worried about messing up her slightly fancy engagement ring and we thought it’d be kind of cool to have matching rings. Amazingly they arrived at my house 4 days<\/em> later.<\/p>\r\n They sure look good. I like how the inlays are sort of hidden in the peened pattern.<\/p>\r\n I wasn’t sure what the ring widths looked like compared to fingers and I couldn’t get google to give me any good image of various widths on hands so for any similar googlers here is what 3mm ring and a 7mm ring look on fingers.<\/p>\r\n![\"Custom](\"\/res\/images\/titanium_wedding_bands.jpg\")
<\/a>\r\n![\"Shiny](\"\/res\/images\/shiny_titanium_wedding_rings.jpg\")
<\/a>\r\n![\"3mm](\"\/res\/images\/7mm_and_3mm_ring.jpg\")
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