Here are tips in caring for your championship rings
This photo recently showed up on Twitter. Looks like a disaster waiting to happen.
Someone is about to season a chicken while wearing their Seahawks Super Bowl ring.
Nothing good is going to come from this (except perhaps a great testing meal).
Here is what many years of collecting championship rings has taught me about caring for championship rings and how to make your sports rings look great:
1) Don’t wear the rings everyday! Gold is a soft metal and easy to damage with small dents, scratches, and dings. Also, keep in mind, especially 14K gold which is softer than 10K gold, the rings can wear down over time and the fine details of the ring can soften (blur) or worse, wear off.
2) Don’t let a jeweler machine polish and buff the ring! Buffing the ring by machine will make a ring look much better, however, you are actually taking off a significant amount of gold! If a ring is 50 grams and contains a lot of dings and scratches, it may wind up losing 5% or more of it’s weight and just like a ring that is worn too much, the details may be lost or significantly softened. There are many ring collectors who keep notes of ring weights (I know I do) and will pay significantly less money for a ring that is 5-10% lighter in weight than it should be. More than 10% means I won’t buy the ring at all.
3) One of the worst things you can do to your championship ring is to clean it with an ultrasonic cleaner. Most championship rings have a black antique finish on the side of the ring. The black finish helps to make the fine details stand out. Over time the black finish does fall off. Using an ultrasonic cleaner will accelerate the black finish falling out much faster.
4) The best way to clean a championship ring is for the jeweler to steam clean it.
5) If a championship ring does have surface scratches, I will have my jeweler lightly hand-buff the ring.
6) If a championship ring could improve by having the antique finish redone please note that this is a risky proposition: There is a good chance that your jeweler may not even have the black substance or have experience doing this.
I wrote a blog about caring for chamapionship rings where I go into much more detail about the 6 tips mentioned above. If you are interested, please check it out at
http://sports-rings.com/wordpress1/2...p-rings-clean/