Talk:Tension ring

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This article was nominated for deletion on 2007-11-09. The result of the discussion was keep.

Who is editing this page to mislead the public into thinking stainless steel and titanium are true tension set rings? Stainless steel and titanium are reserved for the fashion types of jewelry and are usually holding synthetic or cheap gems.

TRUE tension rings such as the design of the Niessing company, Steven Kretchmer, etc are made of precious metals (gold, platinum and palladium) and they are not simply made of traditional jewelry alloys but exotic alloys of precious metals, that are then work hardened and heat treated for extra strength. That's not the end of the story either, in order to design the ring properly, the ring has to be designed in a certain way as to hold the gemstone the perfect way. Many times the ring is cut in a way so that it holds the girdle of the stone in the perfect position where the ring is designed to match perfect the facets of the gem.

These other lesser quality imitations done in stainless steel and titanium are just a tube of plain stainless steel or titanium that need no work hardening (they are already VERY hard) and are not put through complex manufacturing processes. They just open it up and slap in any cheap stone because they are not concerned whether it breaks or not.

Who ever deleted the section describing the work hardening processes and special alloys that MUST go into the precious metals of a TRUE tension ring is leaving out vital information and misleading people to believe that a titanium/staninless steel tension ring is on par of quality with that of a true tension ring constructed of precious metals. It's not worth the maker's time to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars into a tension ring made of titanium or stainless steel that only costs them $3 in materials, because no one is interested in purchasing a $1000 steel ring.

Every single tension ring is manufactured for that one stone only, not the other way around because girdle thickness, facet angles and sizes, etc will all vary from stone to stone except in large exact/calibrated lots of gems that are cut by machine such as topaz, cheap sapphire, small diamonds, etc. This allows the stone to be set in a tention ring without making the tension ring with special design or manufacturing processes and allows a much cheaper product to be produced.

Born2drv 02:04, 17 March 2007 (UTC)born2drv

Mumble. Either you are describing the encyclopedic concept of a tension ring, which can be defined in engineering terms, I suppose as "a gemstone ring where the metal does not connect under the stone", more or less - or you are writing an ad for the Niessing product - in which case you can go edit an article called "Niessing tension ring" - or get lost; Wikipedia frowns on ads masquerading as articles. It would be reasonable (in my uninformed, highly biased opinion) to make separate sections for "precious-metal tension rings" and "cheap tension rings". But don't try to reserve the term "tension ring" for one of the classes unless you either have a trademark on the term or can show an engineering (not advertising) reason why there should be a separate term for the cheaper variant. --Alvestrand 10:39, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

First tension ring I can find is the 1979 model by Bunz, not the 1981 example by Niessing. I'll check back in a while and fix the article if no earlier examples are found. 68.51.48.176 20:32, 6 May 2007 (UTC)