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Comment by snitty | Hacker News Reader

One big warning with this is that if you get into an accident and the doctors need to remove your ring, they're going to have a very hard time cutting stainless steel off your finger.

I saw a video of someone making a ring out of polycrystalline diamond and…if that gets stuck for some reason, it's never coming off.

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Other than a few comments on Reddit, every jewelry site that I've looked up says that stainless steel can be cut off with regular ring cutting tools.

The biggest difficulty that I know of with it is that the material is not very workable, and so if you need to get the ring resized, you may be out of luck.

Couldn't you just shatter the diamond with minimal risk to the actual finger?

Probably. That's how they get tungsten carbide rings off.

I was rotating the carbides on a wood planer and a couple of them were held in by machine screws that weren't budging. I called Byrd, and their recommendation once you've stripped the screws is to shatter the inserts. I put a crappy chisel underneath and whacked it with a hammer.

I can confirm that it works. I heartily recommend a face shield, and I wouldn't want to be the first guy the doctor had to break a ring off of.

>I saw a video of someone making a ring out of polycrystalline diamond and…if that gets stuck for some reason, it's never coming off.

Diamond is easy to remove: it'll melt with a blowtorch.

(You didn't say the finger had to be preserved intact...)

A Dremel with a regular cut off wheel would cut right through titanium.

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