Tungsten carbide insert colors – the coatings that cause them
Here’s the secret behind Tungsten Carbide insert colors. Plain tungsten carbide is grey, and various other colors are the result of the coating material. If the insert has multiple coatings, the color is that of the topmost coating. Here are the colors corresponding to various materials.
If you’re thinking, “Hey, this stuff looks so beautiful, maybe I should start making jewellery out of it and become rich”, I have bad news for you. Someone already beat you to it. Tungsten carbide jewellery is quite popular already, for more or less the same reasons that we use it in metal cutting. Because of its hardness, a ring or bracelet made from Tungsten Carbide will not lose its lustre (unlike silver or gold), will never need polishing, and is scratch-proof. Also it is hypo-allergenic, which means you can’t be allergic to it, like some people are allergic to Silver or Gold jewellery (they’re actually allergic to the traces of Nickel in these).
If you’re planning to get married many times in your life (like Glynn Wolfe, with his 29 marriages), a tungsten carbide ring would be a good idea to save money by not buying a new ring for each new marriage. It’ll be totally scratch proof, being an 8.5 on the Moh’s scale of hardness (versus Diamond’s 10). Each time a marriage breaks up (a marriage can either break up or break down, and they both mean the same thing – peculiar, right ?) and the spouse chucks his/her ring back at you, you just pick it up, dust it off, and give it to the next one – no scratches, shining like brand new.
Pic. source: Cadem NCyclopedia multimedia CNC training software
