Gotta say I love the ad copy for the 10 pound cube:
ADD to your collection! This cube is the larger version of the world famous tungsten cube
COMPARE the density to our 2.5" Aluminum cube to enhance the experience
'Official' sports kettlebells are all the same physical size but are available in a wide range of weights. For sizes 8kg to about 32kg they just use steel. For heavier ones they use lead. The very heaviest kettlebells contain tunsten.
Shoes (especially the ones people buy for fashion value – think Louboutin stilettos vs. something more functional like New Balance sneakers) are a Veblen good. Their perceived value increases with their price. Like art.
Also, if a market is efficient, prices will closely track (marginal) use value. If a brand can demand a price premium, it's because their products are higher quality, and nobody has been able to produce a comparable product at a lower cost. Red Wing boots are more expensive than Timberland boots, for example, because they're made from full-grain leather and have good quality control, and they will last the rest of your life if you care for them properly. (They're more expensive than New Balance sneakers, too, but Nike sneakers are the same price as Red Wing boots without being of high quality, for the Veblen-good reasons you cite.)
That's why when I buy wine for my girlfriend I don't buy the cheapest brand. It's not that I think the wine market is efficient, particularly when I'm at a supermarket that can charge whatever price they want instead of comparing prices at https://1000corks.com/; it's that I think my ignorance of wine is deeper than the market's inefficiency.
That is not quite it - in a relatively efficient market with numerous transactions, price can be a good indicator of value. Basically: "This store is busy selling lots of shoes, and apparently a bunch of people are buying them, so they must be worth the price."
I do this sometimes with cheaper stuff that I don't know much about. E.g. A shovel or something. I don't know much about shovels, but I know I want a good one. So I will be biased toward the more expensive shovel on the rack, assuming I can afford it. If it wasn't better, then presumably all the people that really know about shovels wouldn't buy it, so then it wouldn't be for sale.
Anyway, the logic here isn't perfect obviously, but still makes reasonable sense and works out okay for stuff you can easily afford and don't know much about.
Because of tungsten has the highest melting point of all metals, it very expensive to cast pure tungsten ingots. Instead, powdered tungsten is mixed with small amounts of powdered nickel or other metals, and sintered.
I bought a set of 1cm element cubes awhile ago. There is definitely a change of perspective of density when you see several things of one generic size, and yet they are dramatically different weights.
I think it's fairly common to see volume and assume weight. And less volume is often assumed to be a structure issue, like expanded metal vs solid blocks of metal.
One excellent application of a block of tungsten is as a bucking bar for metal riveting. Due to its density, tungsten bars can be much smaller than steel ones, easily fitting into your hand, and fitting into tight spaces. I’ve got a number of tungsten bars and use them almost 100% over my steel bars.
> Nietzsche once said that a man who has a why can bear almost any how. But a man who has a tungsten cube can bear any object less dense, and all this talk of why and how becomes unnecessary.
I had a neighbor a few years back who was a retired mechanical eng & machinist and as a retirement gift someone gave him a calibrated high percision gauge block set. There was some weird brain tingle I would get handling them, I think simply due to the extreme percision of them, I wonder if the sensation from handling the cube is similar?
Cool 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 anyway, it seems).
I had to look this up: ‘Ring avulsion happens when a ring on one of your fingers is caught on an object and gets yanked off suddenly and rapidly. The force and pressure of the ring being pulled can strip off and damage finger tissues, including muscles, tendons, and bones. This is called “degloving.”‘
https://www.healthline.com/health/ring-avulsion
Ah, thanks, those are the kind of search queries that I'm somewhat apprehensive about. Especially with search engines that think it's a good idea to immediately show you images if they think you're searching for something visual.
Thankfully the article you linked doesn't contain any images.
Try finding a machinist that wears jewelry. Either they have yet to learn a painful lesson or they will have learned it directly or indirectly (colleague, machinist friend). That's one thing you learn to respect in a hurry: no jewelry near rotating machinery.
And loose clothing, gloves, ties (I once saw a visiting salesguy almost lose his head in a demonstration lathe), in fact anything that can end up where you don't want it to.
Similar advisories hold for printing presses, farm equipment and so on. Printing presses are particularly nasty because they tend to be so spotless that you can't tell if they're rotating or not by looking at the surface.
The ones I saw from a quick search were nice looking but pretty pricey. Basic Gold rings were going for the same price as some of the fancier designs so I think that would be more of a design / aesthetic choice.
Titanium / Tungsten / Silver are for people who want an inexpensive ring.
Funny because titanium is actually a very cheap material. I got a 1" cube of it for about $30. I assume almost all of the price is labor for working with it rather than the cost of the metal itself.
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.
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.
My problem with Stainless Steel is a nickle allergy. Skin gets raw, itchy and red if I wear a stainless steel ring for more than a few hours and it takes days to heal after contact ends.
I also have to test Sterling Silver as it is supposed to only be 92.5% Silver and 7.5% copper but sometimes it is adulterated with nickel and can cause me to have a breakout.
Similarly, if missing pliers, you should be able to set it on a hard surface(like concrete or metal) and give it a few tough taps with something hard. They shatter shockingly easy.
I bought a tungsten wedding band and will never again. Not because of its hardness but because I dropped it on the floor and it shattered. Apparently tungsten is very brittle and is useless on a hand that does anything. Luckily it was cheap.
As others have mentioned, that band was not made of metallic tungsten, which does not shatter, but of sintered tungsten carbide ceramic, which shatters like any ceramic, even if not as easy as ceramic cookware.
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.
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.
There are many emergencies where innocent bystanders won't have the tools or knowledge to extricate me. I would expect ambulance and/or fire brigade services to have such tools at the ready though, just as how they have the fancy hydraulic press-metal-apart-with-extreme-force tools to get people out of car wrecks.
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.
I don't think I ever said that an EMT would amputate your finger. I said that you might get further injuries. For instance: embedded Tungsten fragments or in case of a prolonged problem removing the ring further tissue damage.
The main point of the person you were replying to was that the finger amputation thing is an urban legend because you can shatter a tungsten ring. And the point of my reply was that an EMT won’t amputate your finger. I just assumed that your reply was refuting that point.
Exactly this. That was my first reaction when someone upthread wrote that they made a ring out of tungsten. I can only imagine that it would lead to misery at some point. You really don't want this kind of metal for Jewelry that surrounds you (wristband, ring, ankleband). You're going to get hurt sooner or later.
My dad owns both a tungsten cube and a tungsten sphere. I slightly prefer the sphere, the smoothness and lack of corners, combined with density, makes it really try to slip out of hour hand.
Can be a bit dangerous for your floors, but lots of fun to hold.
I have plenty of samples of explosion bonded metals that I fidget with in a similar manner. Samples that combine metals with different densities feel unnatural in the hand.
I 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…
I'm quite curious what the circumstances of that would have been. I looked it up because I thought I was mistaken, but ya: it's nuclear reactor byproduct and itself capaple of being turned into a nuclear weapon (or only some isotopes maybe? Not sure). It also apparently is capable of just starting on fire in open air, is poisonous, radioactive obviously and accumulates in the bones. Sounds like fun stuff.
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?"
Good for him. There are a lot of places I've been that I was so sure I'd make it back to. Yeah, not gonna happen. But in a few of those places, I brought something back. One's mostly quartz, one's mostly basalt. With them, I can travel in time.
I 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 labsheet) you probably bought some tungsten. Lead, slag, tin and other undesirable byproducts also weigh a lot. Your cube, without proper inspection, may also be slightly radioactive as its likely sourced from scrap. This could be good or bad, but the cube most definitely isn't a meaningful purchase.
Every material more dense than tungsten costs more than tungsten, and the same goes for anything that even close close. Only thing you need to do to determine if you were screwed or not is measure the density. Since it's a cube the only thing you need is a ruler and a scale.
As for the value to a consumer. That comes almost entirely from its density not its hardness, something you'd know if you read OP.
As for the "vastly inflated prices" if you have the ability to produce and sell 1 kilogram cubes with the side length of an inch and a half for significantly less than OP paid then you should consider selling that information and retiring.
What are the materials with similar, but lower, densities? WC, I guess, at 15.63 g/cc; what else?
Apparently wholesale tungsten costs US$30/kg, which is about one fourth the US$130 cost the guy paid. I'd think either wire EDM or wire ECM would be able to dice tungsten into featureless cubes for a lot less than US$100/kg. Its brittleness wouldn't be a problem.
Also, it could very easily be impure, or even not tungsten at all; lots of people have gotten tricked into buying tungsten-carbide jewelry they thought was tungsten, and tungsten carbide isn't even metal. The Amazon seller says it's actually 5% nickel and iron, though I'm not clear whether it's an alloy or a powder-metallurgy sinter using those metals as sintering aids. Alloys aren't necessarily less dense than their densest pure component, so impurities might not even lower the density. X-ray fluorescence would be a cheap way to detect heavy-metal impurities (though not, say, boron, carbon, or nitrogen).
The guy is excited about how it's durable and will last for a long time. I think he will be disappointed if it really is so brittle that he chips the corner off by dropping it on the floor. Probably the nickel and iron will prevent that.
Yes, but it seems like the Pet Rock for this crowd. It's entertaining to give it a heft, but I doubt if it will see as much daily use as his amortization projection suggests.
I think a better desk objet is a Curta calculator.
I spent $2K (X-carve). I've made spheres, cubes, boxes, various 3D shapes I bought on Ebay, and keep the parts around (they're nice to look at as well as hold during long meetings). A cube with filleted edges is particularly nice, although you can make that easily with just a table saw and a sander. If you sand it enough, it can be unbelievably smooth. or you can make it rough.
note that I'm mainly doing wood because the x-carve can't carve aluminum easily (no idea about tungsten). If I could make metal cubes, I would.
The actual hobby here is all sorts of wood projects, like tables, arts, etc, but I still make small geometry pieces all the time because I enjoy 3D graphical objects in the real world.
338 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadIf you get the set that has the copper cube beware that the copper one will oxidize and discolor if you touch it a lot.
> WHY? We thought nobody would buy our 17.6lb, 3" tungsten cube. We were so, so wrong
It wasen't till she raised her prices significantly things got going.
Wealthy measure value by price. (I don't get it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
That's why when I buy wine for my girlfriend I don't buy the cheapest brand. It's not that I think the wine market is efficient, particularly when I'm at a supermarket that can charge whatever price they want instead of comparing prices at https://1000corks.com/; it's that I think my ignorance of wine is deeper than the market's inefficiency.
edit: I have https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27522826
I do this sometimes with cheaper stuff that I don't know much about. E.g. A shovel or something. I don't know much about shovels, but I know I want a good one. So I will be biased toward the more expensive shovel on the rack, assuming I can afford it. If it wasn't better, then presumably all the people that really know about shovels wouldn't buy it, so then it wouldn't be for sale.
Anyway, the logic here isn't perfect obviously, but still makes reasonable sense and works out okay for stuff you can easily afford and don't know much about.
Also pure tungsten is often excessively brittle.
I think it's fairly common to see volume and assume weight. And less volume is often assumed to be a structure issue, like expanded metal vs solid blocks of metal.
I wish I could afford an osmium cube. I guess tungsten is the best cheapest-yet-still-heavy option.
If tungsten isn't dense-enough for you, consider platinum or rhenium.
I'm not saying one is a better choice than the other, but I know which one I'd get.
(Description says it's "great for melting". Good luck with that!)
If you're gonna be pedantic then try to do a good job of it.
...that said, had I organically encountered the tungsten cube on Amazon, I absolutely would google around to make sure it was, like, real.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RZKKKAM6FE5AI
I love letting people hold it. I call it my heavy ball.
It's so cool how they wring without magnetism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5XOk1oMFh0
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 anyway, it seems).
Thankfully the article you linked doesn't contain any images.
Similar advisories hold for printing presses, farm equipment and so on. Printing presses are particularly nasty because they tend to be so spotless that you can't tell if they're rotating or not by looking at the surface.
https://www.larsonjewelers.com/can-tungsten-rings-be-cutoff
Terrible for rings, just go with silver if you want or need a cheap wedding ring.
Titanium / Tungsten / Silver are for people who want an inexpensive ring.
Titanium should also work great for forced amputation in the case of a broken finger I suppose...
Every metal mentioned has someone talking about losing a finger. Do you work for a silicone ring company?
For me, before I touch a lathe or mill, the ring goes in my left back pocket. Every time.
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.
I also have to test Sterling Silver as it is supposed to only be 92.5% Silver and 7.5% copper but sometimes it is adulterated with nickel and can cause me to have a breakout.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN71I3PKR6g
They'd also know that you can crack a tungsten ring, so they wouldn't need to do that in the first place.
Can be a bit dangerous for your floors, but lots of fun to hold.
I bet a lot of energy went into creating that sphere…
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.
This must have caused havoc with your frugality.
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?"
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.
https://www.smart-elements.com/shop/tungsten-precision-densi...
https://www.smart-elements.com/shop/tungsten-electrode-99-95...
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 labsheet) you probably bought some tungsten. Lead, slag, tin and other undesirable byproducts also weigh a lot. Your cube, without proper inspection, may also be slightly radioactive as its likely sourced from scrap. This could be good or bad, but the cube most definitely isn't a meaningful purchase.
As for the value to a consumer. That comes almost entirely from its density not its hardness, something you'd know if you read OP.
As for the "vastly inflated prices" if you have the ability to produce and sell 1 kilogram cubes with the side length of an inch and a half for significantly less than OP paid then you should consider selling that information and retiring.
Apparently wholesale tungsten costs US$30/kg, which is about one fourth the US$130 cost the guy paid. I'd think either wire EDM or wire ECM would be able to dice tungsten into featureless cubes for a lot less than US$100/kg. Its brittleness wouldn't be a problem.
Also, it could very easily be impure, or even not tungsten at all; lots of people have gotten tricked into buying tungsten-carbide jewelry they thought was tungsten, and tungsten carbide isn't even metal. The Amazon seller says it's actually 5% nickel and iron, though I'm not clear whether it's an alloy or a powder-metallurgy sinter using those metals as sintering aids. Alloys aren't necessarily less dense than their densest pure component, so impurities might not even lower the density. X-ray fluorescence would be a cheap way to detect heavy-metal impurities (though not, say, boron, carbon, or nitrogen).
The guy is excited about how it's durable and will last for a long time. I think he will be disappointed if it really is so brittle that he chips the corner off by dropping it on the floor. Probably the nickel and iron will prevent that.
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.
I think a better desk objet is a Curta calculator.
I would think you can easily sell it for the same or better price. It's like gold. It's a capacitor of wealth
Or did you really spend $5,000 on a machine for your hobby of making cubes just so you can hold them?
If you are serious, I think we could be friends. Maybe I should make a subreddit for people like us?
note that I'm mainly doing wood because the x-carve can't carve aluminum easily (no idea about tungsten). If I could make metal cubes, I would.
The actual hobby here is all sorts of wood projects, like tables, arts, etc, but I still make small geometry pieces all the time because I enjoy 3D graphical objects in the real world.
I mainly read https://www.reddit.com/r/CNC/ but you may also find this interesting: https://www.instructables.com/Turners-Cube-Manual-Machine/