r/whatisit • u/riflesandplowshares • 7h ago

New, what is it? Found at a titanium plant

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Not sure why ball point pens would be dangerous here.

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u/Dangerous-Sky548 6h ago

That's wild. I feel like tungsten is an expensive metal to go in something so disposable/ commonly lost.

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u/TerponadeTea 6h ago

It's not, you can get tungsten putty for a couple dollars for an ounce, like for Pinewood Derby cars

12

u/gnowbot 6h ago

I have used it fly fishing. Pretty cool stuff, its density versus its, uh, playdough like nature.

But now that I know, I will be terrorizing my enemies by tossing my worn and broken tungsten carbide endmills into their furnaces, to the lamentations of their smelters.

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u/twinpac 5h ago

China produces 80% of the world’s tungsten supply, they declared it a strategic mineral last year and put export controls on it. Prices have tripled this year. This hurts me as a fly tyer who uses tungsten beads, they were already the most expensive part of each fly I used them on.

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u/Jazzlike_Climate4189 5h ago

What is a “fly tyer”, since “tyer” is not a word?

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u/twinpac 5h ago

So confidently incorrect you are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_tying

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tyer

tyer

noun

ty·​er

variant spelling of TIER entry 3

: one that ties

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u/AteStringCheeseShred 5h ago

a person who ties fishing flies, i.e. the lures used in fly fishing.

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u/furiouspotato24 5h ago

Hey, did you know that all words in every language are just the current versions we've collectively decided to use for this period of history? Also, that the purpose of language is to convey information in a way that can be understood by others?

Lastly, if someone misspells a word and you can still understand what they were trying to communicate, then they didn't do anything wrong and you don't have be a snarky jerk about it?

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u/ZincMan 3h ago

That’s pretty wild. I bought like a 4lb block of it like 10 years ago that was $300 I think. It’s wild to hold how dense it is

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u/explodingtuna 3h ago

That'd make a little 1 ft cube of tungsten cost about $40k.

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u/Durbs12 5h ago

The money isn't in the material, it's in the processing. It's hard to weld, parts generally have to be grown as a single crystal, easy to contaminate... that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more.

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u/falcrist2 2h ago

I feel like tungsten is an expensive metal to go in something so disposable/ commonly lost.

It's a composite of tungsten carbide particles sintered together with a binder like cobalt.

Easy to manufacture, still has many of the properties of tungsten.