How to Remove Tungsten Rings In an Emergency: A Safe, Easy Procedure
There are many questions, rumours, and utter misconceptions circulating on the web about what should or must be done for the Emergency Removal of Tungsten Rings when a person wearing a tungsten carbide wedding band suffers an injury with swelling to the arm, hand, or finger necessitating the ring’s safe removal. Traditionally, wedding rings are made from gold or other similarly soft materials so it was just a matter of snipping the ring with metal or wire cutters. Of course this method will not work on a very hard strong material like tungsten, but it is still completely possible to Safely Remove a Tungsten Ring.
Much of the confusion regarding how to remove tungsten rings in emergencies stems from the accurate but misunderstood reputation tungsten rings have for being extremely strong, hard, and difficult to damage. Tungsten carbide certainly does have all these qualities, but due to a lack of knowledge or the intention to deliberately scare consumers away from competing merchandise, the toughness of tungsten has somehow spawned an ugly myth: the claim that tungsten rings cannot be cut off in emergencies and would thus require amputation of the finger. This could not be more wrong! Again, tungsten rings cannot be cut off by traditional methods, but nothing in the world is completely indestructible. Any personnel responding to an emergency remove tungsten rings by cracking them with a simple set of vice grip pliers, which are found in nearly every tool box and kept on hand by emergency rooms.
The emergency removal of tungsten rings should be performed by paramedics, doctors, or other qualified personnel whenever possible rather than attempted by the wearer or an untrained person, but on the condition that we make it clear that an untrained individual should safely remove a tungsten ring for his/her own hand or someone else’s ONLY as a last resort, a knowledgeable tungsten rings company has granted us permission to use the following video. In this video, they demonstrate how to remove tungsten rings in an emergency.
To remove tungsten rings in emergencies, you just need a set of vice grips. The emergency removal of tungsten rings is quite easy; simply clamp the vice grips onto the ring and listen for the ring to crack, slightly rotate the ring, and apply pressure with the vice grips again until the ring breaks. If you’ve followed the instructions for how to remove tungsten rings in an emergency the ring will shatter into several pieces. It is actually easier to safely remove a tungsten ring than other types of rings. One can remove tungsten rings in emergencies with no further injury or discomfort to the wearer, while gold rings often bend out of round during trauma and cut or compress fingers in painful ways, and getting a cutting tool between the bent gold ring and injured finger in order to remove it can be excruciating. Tungsten rings, on the other hand, cannot bend out of round, and have often actually protected the ring finger from the brunt of the trauma. Tungsten rings can only break or not break, and since incremental pressure from a vice grips is used to remove tungsten rings in emergencies, no more pain or disturbance to the injured area occurs.
So as a last resort in an emergency, remove tungsten rings as instructed in the video above. The amputation myth is busted!
