Installer Refused to use Titan magnet

[Coma]

@Pilgrimsmaster

I dont recall anybody being refused an install of one.

My artist was reluctant of installing it because of its size and my relatively small fingers - so yeah, that’s something I can understand. Placement can be tricky, and if it doesn’t fit, it makes no sense to try it at all. Arnulf said he was willing to try it, but I had to clearly state that I was aware of a high-ish risk of rejection. It all went fine, but like I said, that is some really understandable concern.

But he even said how much he liked the idea of the Titan, the perfect and durable and implant-grade coating and all that, so I have no clue what the abovementioned artist had to criticise…
I didn’t check the grade of the titanium before, but I trust Amal when he says it’s implant grade - I wouldn’t do that for many other companies, but DT has gained my trust
And as for the edges, like I said it’s a tight fit for me, and the edges are no problem at all.

@Tuna.Fork

Although they were not willing to install the Titan, they were willing to install a different magnet that they keep in stock.

This seems a little… fishy. Maybe he’s just more comfortable working with the magnets he knows, maybe he has made good experiences with them, but maybe he just wants to sell more of his own magnets. Dunno, and I don’t want to do your artist any wrong.
Mine sells the (silicone coated) Haworth magnets and usually uses them, but he openly admitted that a titanium coating might be a much better, though much more expensive, idea.

But ultimately and after all

@Az_F

It’s completely up to the installer to decide if they want to install something or not.

This.

I hope you’ll find an artist who is willing to install your Titan

[Pilgrimsmaster]

@Coma

My artist was reluctant of installing it because of its size and my relatively small fingers - so yeah, that’s something I can understand.

Oh, thats my bad, I wasnt very clear, I meant refused install due to the safety of the TiTAN as a product.

[Coma]

Yeah, that’s what I wanted to point out as well - there might be reasons for not getting a Titan in your finger, but it’s definitely not the product safety. The size, maybe, but the safety definitely not.

[amal]

@Az_F

Parylene is not the worst. If done well it will last for years and for a long time

Unfortunately it’s not just that the parylene was applied correctly, they also must be handled appropriately the entire time between manufacture and installation. Parylene C is usually used for this, and it is a monomer. It’s applied in a vacuum at high velocity, typically in layers. The monomer particles are jagged and rough, and ram together like forcing a bunch of puzzle pieces to stick together by crushing them into a ball rather than laying them out carefully. This is all fine, and works well enough, but only if nothing comes along to press on the haphazardly constructed mass with much force. Once you do, it will crack and crumble as each individual particle is jostled around.

Parylene coating was designed and developed for protecting components on PCBs that don’t encounter any force at all, but need protection against the elements (moisture, dirt, etc). For PCBs that do encounter forces (like in rockets or military jets), a different coating is used. This was never designed for anything like magnets. This is the heart of the problem with parylene coated magnets in my view. The material is so brittle and sensitive, and you’ve literally coated a magnet - a thing that is violently pulled toward other things if you get it too close. I’ve literally seen body modders with stacks of these magnets in their bags before… like, how did you get them to gently stack together on each other without the typical "click" that comes with getting two magnets too close to each other? Ah, you didn't.. you just picked one off the stack to show me, then let it snap right back to the top of the stack without a second thought. But even if your supplier hasn’t stacked them, how could you ever be sure they didn’t let them come into any contact with any magnetically active metals what so ever? From the moment you take a parylene coated magnet out of the coating chamber, it’s a liability.

Giant cracks in parylene are easily detectable, but small any pathways which may have opened up for moisture to get in to the magnet and start breaking it down - those are not possible to see with the naked eye. Not to mention any small pieces that may flake off or abrade over time, only to be lost forever floating around in your body.

Parylene is the most risky way to coat a magnet, yet here we are discussing the safety of grade 2 pure machined titanium I can literally blast with a laser and smash with a hammer and still not breech the core…

Hammer Titan: Smashing a Titan with a hammer

… all because it’s not a “mirror finish”… which by the way has never been tested or validated in any way for anything by anyone… it’s just that it “feels like it should be”… but no data has ever been collected on this. I mean shit, just take a look at the most common titanium implants - hip replacements. The only mirror finish on there is the friction surface where the socket rests on the ball (for obvious reasons)… the rest is just dull grey machined titanium.

So yes, some people get lucky and have parylene coated magnets implanted that withstand the test of time, but overall the results are in - parylene is risky AF, yet professionals seem to keep using and implanting devices with substandard coatings while throwing up static about the Titan… well mark me down as “annoyed”.

[Az_F]

@amal

I’ve literally seen body modders with stacks of these magnets in their bags before…

Oh god. I’m glad I didn’t get mine from a piercer

[Satur9]

Here’s a thread with pictures of one I have removed after ~2 years. Got it from my piercer

Finger Magnet Removal and Titan Install (there will be blood )

Here’s some pics of the removed parylene coated magnet. Not as bad as I thought, but still not great. Luckily it all came out in one piece. [IMG_20210227_001113] You can see some stress cracking, some bubbling, and a whole bunch of surface pitting. [IMG_20210227_000848] [IMG_20210227_000902] [IMG_20210227_001040] While it hadn’t yet “failed” as dramatically as my first magnet, it definitely left some loose parylene and Nickel floating around in my system. I may have a mild allergic rea…

[amal]

@Tuna.Fork

they seemed very, very bothered by “sharp edges” and “not polished to a mirror finish.

I guess I’m not done… my brain won’t let it go… so to continue to pile on, let’s take a look at the design;

1. The edges are chamfered. This is literally to remove the 90° edge and cut it way down to a series of simple 45° facets.

2. The purpose of the Titan is sensing + lift. If you make something absolutely smooth, it will just roll around in your tissue and not produce hardly any sensation because it’s not going to move your tissue around all that much. You need it to be “ribbed for your pleasure” so to speak… without it being “sharp”. These edges are chamfered specifically so they are not “sharp”, but they have enough of an edge to produce some sensation when moving around inside the fiberous encapsulated pocket they will live in once healed. This pocket is one big reason why implanted magnets lose some sensation, as this tissue is totally devoid of sensory nerves and creates more distance between the surface of the magnet and any sensory nerves surrounding it… effectively muting sensation. The 45° edges made by the chamfer are intended to “knock around” the extremely robust and durable encapsulation tissue made of fibrin and collagen, without cutting or damaging or really doing anything to it. What I’m saying is, the edges are by design.

3. There are concentric circles (machine tooling marks) on the top and bottom surface of the Titan. These are sinusoidal, i.e. shaped like small waves. We did not polish them away because they are “soft”… must softer than the chamfers. The hope is that they may also provide some tactile feedback when the magnet is moving or tumbling around inside the encapsulation pocket, but I’m not sure how effective this will be. What I am sure of though is that it would have increased cost quite a bit to apply polishing, so after evaluating the tooling marks for safety, I opted to keep them and hope they improved sensitivity rather than unnecessarily increasing the cost for customers.

I guess the thing that bothers me the most is that artists gonna art… but if an artist is going to make definative statements like “it’s unethical to implant the Titan because X, Y, Z” then they better bring some goddamn science to back it up… and so far I’ve not heard anything other than opinion. So far, there have been zero issues with Titan installs other than incorrect installs needing to be redone. Every Titan that has been installed correctly has healed extremely quickly and well, and nobody has had any issues to report to date. That’s a 100% success rate, which no other magnet has… not even the xG3 (we’ve had a 3 or 4 breakage incidents with axials getting slammed on the end and the glass cap breaking off).

[amal]

Just to try to put a nail into the coffin with regard to “polished smooth” argument, here is a 3D printed titanium bone shackle implant;

… just to prove it - actually implanted …

link to the paper - Applied Sciences | Free Full-Text | Integration of a Three-Dimensional-Printed Titanium Implant in Human Tissues: Case Study

There is some ostio-integration expected to happen on the inner surfaces where contact with bone is expected, and this is where certain roughness can be expected… but the outer surfaces that come into direct contact with tissue are not polished because they don’t have to be.

After some thinking on this, I think the idea of “polished to a shiny surface finish” actually comes from piercing jewlery…

This is absolutely where you will need polished surfaces… why? Whats’ the difference? Well, the difference is in how the body handles healing with a piercing like this vs an implant. With a piercing, your skin will try to form a tube… it will be your body trying to set up your epidermis and dermis to come into direct contact with the surface of the jewelry, not collagen and fibrin (scar tissue). This is a fundamentally different healing process from what the body does to an implant like the Titan.

Furthermore, a skin tube like this with metal hanging through it will require constant cleaning. During healing it is critical, but even after a piercing is fully healed, moisture, skin oils, constant dead skin cell production from the epidermis… all of these things create a wonderful environment for bacteria. A smooth finish on your jewelry is absolutely required to reduce irritation of the skin (a sensitive organ), enable easy cleaning and flushing of your “skin tube”, and reduce places for bacteria to hide.

Ultimately I can see why a body modder or piercer may naturally want to extrapolate this idea to metal implants like the Titan… but I think they are failing to give it a bit of critical thought as to why it’s not the same.

[ThePolishedTurd]

@amal

After some thinking on this, I think the idea of “polished to a shiny surface finish” actually comes from piercing jewlery…

I suspect that is where the confusion comes from.

[amal]

@Tuna.Fork

listed as “medical grade titanium”

updated the product listing specifications to declare “grade 2 titanium” … that one was fair.

[Eriequiet]

I came for the annoyed knowledge dump, and I got an excellent show

[Tuna.Fork]

@amal

The monomer particles are jagged and rough, and ram together like forcing a bunch of puzzle pieces to stick together by crushing them into a ball rather than laying them out carefully. This is all fine, and works well enough, but only if nothing comes along to press on the haphazardly constructed mass with much force. Once you do, it will crack and crumble as each individual particle is jostled around.

This is exactly the type of thing that would have been great to have been told by the artist during the discussion I had with them, because, knowing that, and everything else in your comment, tells me that I’d have one gathering with my pals, and I’d need a trip to the hospital to have it removed, because it’d definitely be shattered.

The stress tests you’ve put everything you produce through are exactly why I’ve never had anything implanted that wasn’t produced by Dangerous Things. I needed that guarantee that the only way the implant is going to break is if the area it’s injected was also irreparably damaged. Was a huge selling point for me, alongside all of the other testing you do to ensure product quality.

So glad I decided to ask questions here, in addition to asking you via email. And thank you again for the lengthy explanation about paralene, what a terrifying material.

[Tuna.Fork]

@amal

updated the product listing specifications to declare “grade 2 titanium” … that one was fair.

That certainly does. I think the more problematic issue for me, was that they claimed they asked you what grade, and that you wouldn’t say, but that didn’t jive for me at all because when I asked you, you replied to my email lightning fast as you always do when I’ve had questions.

I’m sure as I continue to read through this, I’ll need to say thank you again for all of your thorough responses, and citation even. Amazing as always. Greatly appreciate it, thank you.

[Eriequiet]

@Tuna.Fork

they claimed they asked you what grade, and that you wouldn’t say, but that didn’t jive for me at all

@amal don’t roll that way lol

I’ve asked him privately nicely enough and he’s told me stuff he had really no obligation to explain…
I was just really curious about how something was done… to see if something was possible and he explained it because he’s good people like that… he just made me pinky swear lol

…or perhaps

because he literally knows how to find me?

edit
Also, if Amal asks me in a few “what was it I told you”
Because he forgot

[Tuna.Fork]

Exactly. I’ll grant that I’ve not had too many questions, but between emails after receiving a product, and what I’ve seen on the forum, Amal’s definitely an information forward kinda guy when it comes to letting people know what we’d be putting into our bodies, why he’s chosen specific things, why he won’t use or hasn’t used other materials, and what the capabilities of things are so people can make informed decisions.

Gave me the impression that they either lied about asking Amal, or lied about his response to them. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume they never talked to Amal about the Titan.

[Tuna.Fork]

Well that was relatively painless. Took a bit of rummaging around to make deep enough pocket for my finger to quit spitting it back out, but nice and quick mod just like the injectables.

Seems like very little swelling, which is great.

(just giving it some air before I put a tegaderm transparent dressing on it.)

[Atilla]

I wanted to comment… I won’t.

Just get a Titan and thank DT later.

[Tuna.Fork]

I don’t understand your comment.

I bought the Titan in mid-April, and was trying to find someone to install it, got refused by a body-modder, asked some questions here about why someone would do that.

At the same time I was still looking for someone to install it, and I found someone near-by to do it, and even posted a picture of it installed last night. It’s good, and there was no way in hell I was ever going to get a magnet from any other company, because I live far too rough a lifestyle to try anything other than DT products.

[Atilla]

I completely understand your situation.
With all the hassle about finding someone to install and more… much more.

I was about to make a comment about the surface finish of the magnet, but I won’t.
It’s all been said.

The eroded magnet that Amal posted pictures of came out of my hand, so I could tell stories…

I’m happy that your implant got sorted. Actually I am. The point I tried to make was to make things as sure as possible whenever it’s possible.

My comment is more like for the past-me, written by future-me.

[Tuna.Fork]

Oohh! Thank you for explaining, I understand completely now!