Hi Amy,

I'm going to flag this for David so that he sees it! 

I'm an unethical coyote with an interest in jewellery (yeah, it does take all sorts...), but if I may hazard a first guess:

Palladium has recently come back from the grave of forgotten materials due to platinum prices spiking about a year ago to around $2000/ounce, or nearly 3 times the cost of gold. Since then, gold has risen noticeably and platinum has collapsed for various reasons that have nothing to do with jewellery. Platinum is now priced at about the same as gold; I thus predict a quick return to the grave for palladium, same as it happened in the 1950s - once restrictions on the use of platinum in anything other than manufacturing explosives were relaxed, platinum took back the little space that palladium had gained...

Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with the metal. It's nicely coloured, slightly lighter in colour than most platinum alloys. It is much less dense than platinum or pure gold, giving the same impression of heft as 14k white gold, but at 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of the other two metals.

It uses soldering temperatures that would melt gold to liquid, and casting requires temperatures similar to platinum. Manufacture or maintenance/re-sizing would not pose particular problems to someone that works platinum.

As far as wear and tear is concerned, palladium is slightly less hard than platinum but it takes a very high polish and like platinum it will "furrow" rather than scratch (no metal is removed by repolishing). It is marginally more reactive than gold or platinum to halogens and nitric acid, but it will repolish very easily (and I don't know too many people who dip their jewellery in liquid iodine on a regular basis). I have seen palladium jewellery from the 1940s looking almost brand new - admittedly it was a brooch, but I would expect it to wear at least as well as 18k gold.

HTH...

OMC and David - thanks for the info. 
 
My ring is in palladium and every jeweler seems to have a hard time with it saying that it actually has a lower melting point than the other metals and thus you can't get my shared  prong setting near the flame at all for re-sizing... I have to do lazer-cutting and adjustments, but maybe that's just because of the shared-prong issue.    Also, I keep getting conflicting info about some of that info on the internet about soldering and casting as well.  Thank you again OMC for you added info.  Maybe others here have also worked with it will have found the same thing and I can really begin to feel like I know "what I have on my hands here".  literally.  There may come a point where I have to just switch to platinum altogether.