Can a Titanium Ring Be Cut Off?

There are 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.

On a side note, 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.

Getting 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.

Quite probably the main consideration when cutting off a Titanium ring is that the blade is brand new or very little used and preferably Tungsten Carbide.

A dull blade will struggle to cut the ring and will heat up the ring quite quickly. Lubrication is quite important too.