Patent Application
20090038339
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a structure bonding different metal for valuable ornaments and particularly to a structure that couples a soft and high value metal with a metal of a greater hardness to form a harder ornament and provide a novel design.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As living standard rises people also have a higher demand on valuable ornaments (such as rings, necklaces, earrings and the like). The valuable ornaments can enhance people's overall aesthetic appeal, and also are good investments and symbols of a higher social standing. Hence they are very popular and become collection items of the general public. The valuable ornaments mostly contain valuable metal ingredients such as gold, Karat-gold, platinum, silver and the like. Because gold and silver have a lower hardness, they tend to deform under external forces after being formed in the ornaments. In ornamental and jewelry industries, in order to facilitate innovation and improve design, some designers try to couple metals of a greater hardness with the valuable metals so that the resulting ornaments have a greater hardness and novel designs can be made easier (for instance stainless steel, tungsten steel, aluminum alloys or titanium alloys are the hard metals desirable for such a purpose). Take ornaments formed by bonding silver and titanium as examples. The titanium alloys have many desirable mechanical characteristics such as rust-proof, light weight, and greater strength. A conventional method to bond the titanium and the silver is soldering. However, due to titanium and silver have great differences in terms of physical characteristics, such as different melting temperature, heat transfer rate, expansion coefficient and the like, the soldering operation to bond these two metals has to include other processes such as chemical deposition, surface treatment and the like, or a more precise and special soldering process has to be used to form a secured soldering. All this involves complicated and more difficult fabrication process and results in a lower production yield. Moreover, with the two different metals bonded by a soldering paste as a medium, they could be loosened and separated under impact or shaking of external forces.
Therefore it is an object of the present invention to provide a valuable ornament (such as rings, necklaces, pendants, earrings and the like) formed by bonding a valuable metal with a metal of a greater hardness (such as stainless steel, tungsten steel, aluminum alloy, titanium alloy, and the like). The ornament thus formed has a greater hardness and can adopt a novel design. The valuable ornament according to the invention includes at least a metal body and a metal of a greater hardness coupling together. These two elements have respectively a coupling surface corresponding to each other. One of them has a latch flange while the other has a mating latch trough to allow the metal body and the metal of a greater hardness to form a secured bonding.
The foregoing, as well as additional objects, features and advantages of the invention will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.
The above and other objects of the present invention will become readily apparent by reference to the following detailed description when considered in conjunction with the accompanying drawings wherein:
Referring to
Because the second coupling surface 121 of the hard metal element 12 is corresponding to the first coupling surface 111 of the metal body 11, and the metal body 11 is softer, when they are aligned and compressed under a suitable pressure the latch flange 112 can be wedged and filled in the latch trough 122 to form a secured bonding between the metal body 11 and the hard metal element 12. To facilitate bonding of the metal body 11 and the hard metal element 12, heat may be applied during the compression and bonding process so that the molecular structure of the two may be altered to enhance the bonding stability (compression and heating of the hard metal element 12 and the metal body 11 are processes known in the art, thus details are omitted).
By means of the structure set forth above, the valuable ornament body 10 consists of at least one metal body 11 and one hard metal element 12. Because of their material characteristics, they can form a desired mechanical latching and bonding. The valuable ornament body 10 thus formed has two or more types of material characteristics on the appearance. Aside from having a greater hardness and abrasion-resistance on the valuable ornament body 10, the novel design thus formed can also increase product competitiveness.
As a conclusion, this invention provides a novel structure and offers a significant improvement over the conventional techniques.
While the preferred embodiments of the invention have been set forth for the purpose of disclosure, modifications of the disclosed embodiments of the invention as well as other embodiments thereof may occur to those skilled in the art. Accordingly, the appended claims are intended to cover all embodiments which do not depart from the spirit and scope of the invention.
