I saw something the other day where a dude talking about a car they were fixing up said they used aluminum for the finish because it looked better than steel and I’m just like “that sounds like how I’ve heard girls prefer eggshell to off-white. They’re the same color!”
Car guys are just the male equivalent of horse girls
aluminum is a great metal for making flashlights. Especially after anodizing it.
It allows heat to be dissipated really fast too.
Makes a great lightweight dutch oven as well (especially when hard anodised). Non stick, doesn’t rust, still distributes and holds heat really well, and about 1/3 of the weight.
where I’m from, “dutch oven” doesn’t have anything to do with an actual oven
Yeah we have that meaning too :D
I still can’t believe there’s people pronouncing it aluminium instead of aluminium
You do realise that aluminium (ium) is not spelled the same as aluminum (um) ? It’s not a case of the same letters being pronounced two different ways
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but actually, I didn’t know that; I just went and read up the history of the word and it’s pretty interesting (for a nerd like me), so thank you for highlighting this. I admit, it used to confuse/irk me to hear Americans pronouncing aluminium like aluminum, so it pleases me to realise that I was wrong and that Americans are actually just pronouncing aluminum like aluminum.
I think I didn’t realise this in part because apparently aluminium is generally used in American scientific writing. This is interesting to me because many journals style guidelines demand American spellings of words (My mind blanks of specific examples right now, but I often have to replace s with z when Americanising my writing). I don’t know why, but I find it neat to imagine a kinship with a hypothetical American scholar who curses as they “correct” aluminum to aluminium before submitting their paper.
Edit: I can’t believe I literally wrote an example of a word with the relevant s/z thing and didn’t notice. Americanise/Americanize
The same people who presumably fill balloons with helum, want to cut down on sodum in their diet, prevent Iran from refining uranum, power their phones with lithum batteries, and enjoy singing David Guetta’s house classic Titanum
Love a good ferromagnetic metal but how about that electric conductivity of copper
I’m a tungsten alloy man myself. Although it’s not nearly as flexible as some other metals, god damn is it strong.
But it is tungsten that reigns supreme:
All the people here who bought this wireless tungsten cube to admire its surreal heft have precisely the wrong mindset. I, in my exalted wisdom and unbridled ambition, bought this cube to become fully accustomed to the intensity of its density, to make its weight bearable and in fact normal to me, so that all the world around me may fade into a fluffy arena of gravitational inconsequence. And it has worked, to profound success. I have carried the tungsten with me, have grown attached to the downward pull of its small form, its desire to be one with the floor. This force has become so normal to me that lifting any other object now feels like lifting cotton candy, or a fluffy pillow. Big burly manly men who pump iron now seem to me as little children who raise mere aluminum.
I can hardly remember the days before I became a man of tungsten. How distant those days seem now, how burdened by the apparent heaviness of everyday objects. I laugh at the philistines who still operate in a world devoid of tungsten, their shoulders thin and unempowered by the experience of bearing tungsten. Ha, what fools, blissful in their ignorance, anesthetized by their lack of meaningful struggle, devoid of passion.
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.
Schopenhauer once said that every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Tungsten expands the limits of a man’s field of vision by showing him an example of increased density, in comparison to which the everyday objects to which he was formerly accustomed gain a light and airy quality. Who can lament the tragedy of life, when surrounded by such lightweight objects? Who can cry in a world of styrofoam and cushions?
Have you yet understood? This is no ordinary metal. In this metal is the alchemical potential to transform your world, by transforming your expectations. Those who have not yet held the cube in their hands and mouths will not understand, for they still live in a world of normal density, like Plato’s cave dwellers. Those who have opened their mind to the density of tungsten will shift their expectations of weight and density accordingly.
To give this cube a rating of anything less than five stars would be to condemn life itself. Who am I, as a mere mortal, to judge the most compact of all affordable materials? No. I say gratefully to whichever grand being may have created this universe: good job on the tungsten. It sure is dense.
I sit here with my tungsten cube, transcendent above death itself. For insofar as this tungsten cube will last forever, I am in the presence of immortality.
Is this a copy pasta? If not, it should be
It is
Okay starkiller.
Mistborn moment
Aluminum is F grade allomantic material.
unless you need to block the allomancy
… Or other investiture
Cheese is better at blocking Shardblades anyway
Uranium is the one true metal
And i hate Tin…
/sn
Together they are thermite!
Doesn’t most cheapo aluminum have iron mixed in to make it more affordable? I worked at a machine shop a couple of months and I remember the shitty castings downright having iron bubbles inside them
As a former cyclist, steel is real. I’ve seen aluminum bikes fail (as in, break at the top and down tube)during a ride. Screw your aluminum!
not to defend Alluminium (bleh), but that’s likely a production error, bad hydroforming, bad welds… at least it’s not CF!
Aluminium doesn’t get stronger on the welds like steel does, it gets weaker. So if you screw them up, you end up with a two part bike
Weaker or more brittle?
I love my steel bike, it’s great on the road, on gravel or for a quick grocery shop.
I’m not gonna win any competition with it but it is honestly such a fun bike.
And with care it should last forever.
…my steel frame split at the welds fourty-five years ago; my bonded aluminum frame has ridden out building fires with nary an issue…
And now I’m back to looking at steel (and titanium) adventure hardtails…
While I agree, I do have to clarify rhat there is a fatigue limit, it’s mainly that the limit for steel increases so fast that few people are willing to put in the testing for billions of cycles to model ultra-high cycle fatigue
Where is that limit supposed to be? The line does not flatten, unlike that of steel. Which is a flat line from 1 million to 1 billion cycles. During the same number of cycles, aluminium drops from 25 to 14 ski, a loss of 44 %. The article specifically mentions:
Some metals such as ferrous alloys and titanium alloys have a distinct limit, whereas others such as aluminium and copper do not and will eventually fail even from small stress amplitudes.
Head’s up, referring to it as a “limit” like your article did is incorrect. In engineering you have what’s called an S-N diagram, which plots out the average time to failure based on average cyclic stress. Basically, a lower avaerage stress results in a higher average life. Also, this plot uses a logarithmic scale for both axis, because then all of the plots are straight lines.
For steel, the S-N diagram has what’s called the “knee”, which is where you have two distinct lines in the S-N curve: one horizontal and one at an angle, with the two intersecting at 1 million cycles. Referring to the knee as a limit (like in the article) is wrong because it’s not a limit; it’s the threshold where if you design a part to last beyond that (aka less cyclic stress than would get 1 million cycles) then it practically lasts forever.
In reality, the part won’t actually last forever, since the S-N curve beyond 1 million cycles isn’t perfectly horizontal. It’s just that reducing your cyclic stress quickly increases your predicted life into billions or even trillions of cycles. This is known as ultra-high cycle fatigue, and it’s generally impractical to do all the testing required to model because each sample would take months to test on the low end. Plus, there’s little demand for such models in the industry, though there are a handful of PhD students and post-docs working on it
Does that change anything regarding the discussion? If the limit is quickly so high that it is beyond reasonable time spans? In the comparison at hand, aluminium has no fatigue limit, steel does. They still use aluminium for aircraft etc. due to the superior weight savings.
Plastic for the win? 😁
He’s right, though. I can’t think of a metal more versatile than aluminium
Pity it’s been suggested it’s a cumulative neurotoxin that contributes to Alzheimer’s disease. That’s the one thing I don’t like about aluminium.
Titanium perhaps - but that is more different to get.
Aluminum is the best metal in the world at being a plastic.
Is this a critique? That’s pretty dope
Not at all makes it ideal for a bunch of different applications.
Vehicle frame is not really one of them.
