I have a tungsten cube and some tungsten dice. They're impressive to hold, and make a nice satisfying thunk when the dice are thrown.
I also have a magnesium cube. Really amazing to compare the weights.
My Tungsten Cube (2019)
121–130 of 336 posts
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#122Damn. Midwest Tungsten Service now owes 'defaulty' a nice little Thank You card.
If anyone wants to compare, my order ID is 10000107xx ;)
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
For context, iridium is probably the densest material you’d want for a paperweight [1] but it’s rarer and more expensive than tungsten or platinum. [1]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-heaviest-metal-I-can-legal...
https://luciteria.com/metal-cubes/iridium-metal-cube-9995
To save people some time clicking through...
A 10mm cube of Iridium weighs ~21.9g. And from this source, costs $9000.
From the same source, a single gram is only $275. This means that due to the difficulty in working with this very dense metal, the cost of turning the Iridium into a cube is nearly $3000 (on top of the ~$6000 for the metal itself)!
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#124I held a neptunium (20.45 g/cc) sphere once. It was about the size of a baseball and I hard the hardest time lifting it. It was like lifting a full gallon jug of milk when you think it's empty - you apply a force and it doesn't budge. I had to lift it as if I was lifting a stack of books to get it off the pedestal.
Uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring on earth, so after that on the periodic table (uranium, neptunium, plutonium…) things are made with collisions in the lab. I bet a lot of energy went into creating that sphere…
osmium is denser than uranium, the issue is that it's quite expensive.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck cutting it off in an emergency.
Don't cut, shatter. Grab some channel locks and be free.
Vice grips would probably be your best bet because they allow you to adjust the diameter they grip at fairly precisely hopefully avoiding further injury to your finger (such as: embedded tungsten fragments).
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#126I wonder if you could mill a dumbbell out of it, so even the handle itself is made of Tungsten. You would have a fairly normal looking 10Lb dumbbell that weight more than 10 Kg or 26Lb. Everyone coming in the house would always (somehow) pick up these Dumbbell.......
I can see some practical joke potential here.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#127Tungsten is about the only minimally-hazardous substance I could find that could max out the 70-pound weight limit on a (US) Priority Mail flat-rate envelope, but that would be an expensive stunt.
Not only that, machining that piece would take ages and wear out a fortune in tooling.
Below I suggested it would be easy for EDM or ECM. Have I been misled?
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#128Cool cube and I want one. But a metalworking friend of mine warned against getting a ring made out of tungsten. Apparently a climber had one on and broke his ring finger, and the EMTs couldn't get the ring off because the finger had swollen and they couldn't cut the ring due to the strength of the metal. They ended up having to amputate and re-attach the finger (much longer and it would have had to be amputated anywa…
If you are in this situation, don't cut the ring, crack it. Pure tungsten, and some alloys like tungsten-carbide, is somewhat brittle. https://www.larsonjewelers.com/can-tungsten-rings-be-cutoff
I originally had a tungsten ring when I got married and managed to shatter both it and its replacement within a year.
Terrible for rings, just go with silver if you want or need a cheap wedding ring.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#129I used to work with tungsten carbide cubes during my PhD thesis. They're used in multianvil high-pressure synthesis. With the right setup you can reach almost 20 GPa of pressure. Not as much as with diamond anvil cells, but you have more reasonable sample sizes (a few milligrams). And thats still like the pressure pretty deep into Earth's mantle.
I also used the opportunity to snap a neat picture of a polished WC cube: https://imgur.com/C2YiMqb.jpg
I always had fun handing them over to students because everyone is surprised by the sheer weight of these things.
Tungsten carbide is actually quite dangerous after it has been subjected to a lot of stress (Such as being stuck into a 1000 t press for a high-pressure synthesis). They have the mean tendecy to explode into super sharp pieces when you're not expecting it, so wear goggles.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#130> I struggled a lot with deciding to buy a cube. It felt wrong to spend so much money on a featureless hunk of metal. When I bought my cube, I used it as an exercise to fight back against my frugality. But it wasn't meant to be: it was delivered to the wrong address and I received a full refund. Then my neighbor delivered it to me.
> Then my neighbor delivered it to me
The only thing that would make this story more perfect is if they'd said, "Wow. Heavy. What do you have in there? A cube of tungsten?"