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My Tungsten Cube (2019)

thume.ca

171–180 of 336 posts

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#171
post #60

William Osman had a video where he "experimented" with a huge tungsten cube. It's quite entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O551__3ppM Another interesting fact about tungsten is that its density is 99.75% of that of gold. So essentially you can model how heavy something is if it was made out of pure gold with tungsten. Additionally, apparently gold counterfeiters sometimes put tungsten inside of gold bars…

Thanks for reminding me that this video exists. William never fails to make me laugh.

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#172
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, machining that piece would take ages and wear out a fortune in tooling.

Bear in mind that we're talking about metallic tungsten here, not tungsten carbide (WC). It's a little slow and expensive but it can be machined in fairly conventional ways, using tungsten carbide tipped tooling. Tungsten has an enormously high melting point, the normal way tungsten parts are produced, for typical industrial purposes such as radiation shielding, is sintering (powder + heat + pressure) to near-net-sha…

Good point, that is a huge difference in hardness.

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#173
post #129

I 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 cub…

FYI, tungsten carbide (tungsten + carbon) is a different substance from the pure metal tungsten... They have very different physical properties. But I do appreciate your story about tungsten carbide, too :-)

> FYI

I'd wager they're fully aware of the differences between tungsten carbide and pure tungsten, having done a doctorate about it.

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#174
I kind of got the gold bug after the 2008-9 crash and bought a few gold coins. Even holding just an ounce of gold, you notice how much more substantial it is than say, a "silver" dollar, which is the same size but weighs a fraction as much.

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#175
post #147
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, you can get your tungsten at Smart Elements

Way more expensive - 120 eur for 1 cm3 cube. https://www.smart-elements.com/shop/tungsten-precision-densi...

If you are willing to sacrifice a little on the appearance they have 1kg tungsten "ingots" for 99€.

https://www.smart-elements.com/shop/tungsten-electrode-99-95...

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the 4" 40 pound $2,999 one? > WHY? We thought nobody would buy our 17.6lb, 3" tungsten cube. We were so, so wrong

My sister owns two shoe stores in LA. It wasen't till she raised her prices significantly things got going. Wealthy measure value by price. (I don't get it.)

Thorstein Veblen wrote a whole book about this phenomenon. Tl;dr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#177
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Below I suggested it would be easy for EDM or ECM. Have I been misled?

EDM will take a very long time, you are going to take off a few microns per hit, and ECM will likely take either an insane amount of power or will take forever across such a large surface. Compared to say machining aluminum or steel you will be practicing some patience. Not necessarily a bad thing to have in the world of metal working. ("increased feed speed is not a substitute for bad planning")

I guess I was thinking that ECM would take less power per mass on tungsten than on things like steel or copper, just because each atom is so much bigger. I'm not very clear on the chemistry, but suppose that we're electrolytically oxidizing each tungsten atom into an orthotungstate ion by withdrawing two electrons from it, with an electrolyte of something like chloric acid or sodium hypochlorite so we don't have to pay more electrons to free up some oxygens. Then at 100% Faraday efficiency we'd cut away 184 daltons of tungsten for every two electrons; contrast with iron where you still need to withdraw two electrons to get a stable water-soluble ferrous ion, but that only buys you 56 daltons of metal removal. Even copper, where the cuprous ion only costs one electron, you only dissolve 64 daltons.

There's also the issue of electrode potentials: sucking a coulomb off your anode at 0.5 volts takes only half a joule, but sucking off the same coulomb at 2 volts takes 2 joules. I don't understand standard electrode potentials well enough to predict what voltage you need for efficient tungsten ECM, but on first glance at the reference table, it doesn't look particularly bleak. The tungsten entries are in the middle of the table, near things like lead, tin, and iron, rather than way down on the upper east side with hoity-toity mercury and iridium, much less out in the ethereal districts where gold and ozone dwell.

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#178
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My choice was titanium, which I used to make ours. It is (IMHO) among the finest of all materials for the job.

Titanium is a good choice, much harder to break than tungsten and cheaper than tungsten or silver, too.

I got a tantalum ring. It look a bit like tungsten or titanium but it's much softer.

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#179
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that in this case there's a finger inside the ring, I'm not sure if that's such an amazing idea.

Just use lighter taps :). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN71I3PKR6g

Haha, you're right, that doesn't look that bad

Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)

#180

This is one of those moments I feel so out of touch with the community here. Is this even real life?

If you take a closer look, it's a brilliant sales pitch with an affiliate link to Amazon.

I see two links there, neither is of an affiliate type.
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