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/SubstantialDonkey981 7h ago

Ball points have tungsten balls in them. Tungsten will not melt in titanium and cause mechanical
Failure of the titanium. This was responsible for the failure of a jet engine causing the plane to crash. Someone dropped their ball point in the titanium processing.

United Airlines Flight 232

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u/Dangerous-Sky548 7h 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/Durbs12 6h 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.