Ya the pearl is one durable son of a ***** in my opinion. If you search my threads you'll see abuse stories that I had. And a bunch of others that added to it. To make a long story short it once took a 16 ft fall off the machine I run hit the job whille spinning flew 50ft slide bout 20 more and stopped in a pool of oil bout half way submerged. Cleaned it up put back to gether and it worked without a hitch.
and just recently got a new trackball assembly but it took about 50 to a hundred cleanings before I lost the crome ring and finaly couldn't get it to work right no more.
So the answer to the question about how many times can you take the crome ring out befor it breaks is about 75 lmao. Give Er take a few. Lol.