I've been dreaming about getting the 4" tungsten cube for a while but could never justify buying it. I would need some extra truly disposable income, like as a side effect if I got really lucky gambling a marginal amount. Sadly in the last year it's price has jumped up 50% from $2000 to $3000.
My Tungsten Cube (2019)
191–200 of 336 posts
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#1921” copper sphere. Satisfyingly heavy and wasn’t expensive, maybe $15 at the Smithsonian gift shop.
I keep it next to a similarly sized, nearly spherical light gray pumice stone I picked up near Crater Lake years ago. Satisfyingly light!
I was given a tungsten carbide ring that’s supposed to be easy on the skin, but it rotted my flesh. I tried not to read anything into it.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#193I purchased a 35 pound tungsten racing weight about 15 years ago, 70% tungsten if I recall. It's large enough that it's triggered my "why do I have this?" sense, but it is still cool to hold.
It's very important to realize that it's not a safe object, the kind you might leave on your desk at work.
If someone tries to pick it up for some reason, it's quite likely that they'll drop it.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#194> 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.
Better tungsten than bitcoins
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#195I work sometimes in a metal shop where Tungsten alloys abound. This might be the stupidest hn post I've ever read. You bought a piece of metal at vastly inflated prices for a very narrow range of performance over a specific set of conditions. Nothing more. Being the hardest isn't being the best. Tungsten is extraordinarily brittle. A hard drop on concrete could crack it. I'd also argue without a MA (metal analysis or…
> This might be the stupidest hn post I've ever read. I don't know... Seems your own post has missed the mark pretty sharply as well. To me, it was abundantly clear that the purpose of this tungsten cube is not for engineering or practical utility.
> he purpose of this tungsten cube is not for engineering or practical utility.
I would think you can easily sell it for the same or better price. It's like gold. It's a capacitor of wealth
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scene of an emergency: hold still while I figure out how to improvise a ring cracker that can crack a solid tungsten ring without further injury to your finger.
EMTs aren't amputating your finger either. You'd go to the ER and they'd call the surgeon. They'd also know that you can crack a tungsten ring, so they wouldn't need to do that in the first place.
If your finger is broken it will swell up so fast you may not even be able to get to the ring with something that can crack it. This is not something that I would risk for any price.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's videos showing exactly how to do it using vice grip pliers available in any hardware store, it's very easy and takes 20 seconds.
Yes, it is. If you have vice grips handy. Emergencies tend to happen 'just like that', you don't get to prepare ahead of time unless you want to accessorize your tungsten ring with a pair of vice grips in your pocket.
Vice grip pliers capable of breaking a tungsten ring is cheaper and easier to purchase than the bolt cutters needed to remove a titanium ring
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
Per unit of mass yes, but there is rather a lot of mass for a given volume. And those are relatively slow processes when it comes to dealing with surfaces. Perpendicular cuts should be a lot quicker (you only have to separate the two sides, in theory one slice of atoms would be enough but in practice you'll end up with some minimal cutting radius).
Fascinating processes by the way, and the precision that you can reach with EDM is insane.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
EMTs aren't amputating your finger either. You'd go to the ER and they'd call the surgeon. They'd also know that you can crack a tungsten ring, so they wouldn't need to do that in the first place.
If your finger is broken it will swell up so fast you may not even be able to get to the ring with something that can crack it. This is not something that I would risk for any price.
Ring crackers and vice grips would both work just fine.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)!
Theodore Gray has a story about visiting a company with an electron beam furnace with Oliver Sacks to turn a pile of loose iridium beads into a bar: https://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/077.x3/index....
Some of the cost isn't just from using the equipment, but because you'll have some evaporation from melting in vacuum. He says at the start of the article that Sacks started with a kilogram of beads:
>After melting from both sides and a lengthy cool down period (plus a couple of "ouch, where are my gloves" moments) Sacks' iridium was consolidated into a block a little over 2" square and less than 1/2" thick, weighing 1.7 pounds. It's startlingly heavy, distinctly more so than a similar sized tungsten block (which would be about 15% lighter and about 10,000% cheaper).
If true, the melt lost 22.7% of the mass, which is pretty painful. Google is saying iridium is about $167,000 per kilo right now! I assume they've got a cold trap on the vacuum line, and recovered some of the difference in weight as fine iridium dust, but the rest is going to end up coating the inside of the vacuum chamber.
If they routinely melt platinum-group metals, I wonder how often they scrap the entire chamber to melt it down and recover the evaporate.