Earlier quoted context omitted.
I accidentally dropped my tungsten carbide wedding band on my kitchen tile floor. Now, I have 4 shattered pieces of tungsten carbide sitting in a box on my desk.
Sounds like the start to an epic quest.
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My Tungsten Cube (2019)
271–280 of 336 posts
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#272Tungsten beads are also popular as a weight for fly fishing nymphs due to their density.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#273> 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?"
True story: When my brother was in college, he played in the University of Illinois marching band. One year, the football team made it to the Rose Bowl. The band flew to Los Angeles to perform and do tourist stuff. On the beach, in a fit of eccentricity, he started picking up rocks from the beach and calling them seashells.
He brought the rocks back to Chicago.
Our grandfather picked him up at the airport and picking up his suitcase, said, "This is really heavy. What, do you have rocks in here?"
"Yes," my brother answered.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#274Tungsten 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.
Gold is also about the same density as tungsten, though it would make for an even more expensive stunt at $1.5 million.
That might be a bit over the limit as far as the insurance that they offer.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#275I love this kind of thing. My favorite fidgeting things are two 2-inch stainless steel ball bearings I got from Ebay. Perfectly round to the eye and mirror smooth. I sit and clack them together; the sound and sensation they make is addictive to me.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#276Earlier 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.
> among the finest of all materials for the job. Titanium should also work great for forced amputation in the case of a broken finger I suppose...
Nah, it cuts like soft stainless-steel. Garden-variety bolt-cutters will go through it like butter.
To wax poetic for a little while, Ti is lightweight, strong, warms quickly to the touch but isn't cold in winter, resists abrasion, doesn't irritate, and is almost immune to corrosion. Its strength allows a lower-profile ring without collapse, too. When making rings for our wedding, I could have used any material under the sun; titanium was our choice.
A material need not be rare to have significance, so it is with love.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They have the mean tendecy to explode into super sharp pieces when you're not expecting it, so wear goggles. Well, I guess I need to buy a new wedding ring at some point.
i read something about a guy shattering his tungsten wedding band on his wedding night, after deciding that slapping his hands on concrete was how you're supposed to dance. professional advice: don't use an exotic metal for your wedding band. some fire departments can't cut it if your ring finger swells up.
Or you could just not wear rings at all. I'm an EMT and the only trauma injury that gives me the creeps is degloving. Happens e.g. when somebody falls off a ladder and their ring gets caught on a nail on the way down. Don't google it.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is with the anti-ring cartel on this thread? Every metal mentioned has someone talking about losing a finger. Do you work for a silicone ring company?
It's a real hazard that is well known in the trades, but might not be appreciated by people who are attracted to the idea of an exotic metal ring but are not in situations where they will be warned about it. The warnings here seem reasonable to me.
There's an easy workaround -- if you're working in a machine shop or where getting your ring caught by something is a possibility, the ring goes in a safe place.
For me, before I touch a lathe or mill, the ring goes in my left back pocket. Every time.
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They have the mean tendecy to explode into super sharp pieces when you're not expecting it, so wear goggles. Well, I guess I need to buy a new wedding ring at some point.
i read something about a guy shattering his tungsten wedding band on his wedding night, after deciding that slapping his hands on concrete was how you're supposed to dance. professional advice: don't use an exotic metal for your wedding band. some fire departments can't cut it if your ring finger swells up.
Apparently you can shatter tungsten rings with a strong pair of locking pliers. See this amazing medical journal article in which "the Internet was consulted which led to a YouTube video": https://www.hindawi.com/journals/criem/2016/8164524/
Re: My Tungsten Cube (2019)
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Normally all furnaces or vacuum chambers where precious metals may evaporate have their walls covered with some metallic foil, e.g. aluminum foil (while the worked metal is heated at very high temperatures by the electron beam, the walls remain much colder), on which the precious metals lost during heating will condense.
After a production batch, the metallic foil is replaced and the used foil is chemically processed and almost 100% of the precious metals are recovered.