Less Common Metals

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

I went for a brief shakedown-run in the little grey hatchback this morning

[ just to reassure myself after last week’s rather traumatic clutch change ]

I ended up in Hooton Park, near the Ellesmere Port Vauxhall factory, and noticed this firm:

https://lesscommonmetals.com/

 

… it’s worth a look at their website

MichaelG.

[Martin King 2Participant @martinking2]

Hi Michael,

very interesting site. My degree was in Metallurgy, many years ago!

did some research into thermit reactions for pool welding.

cheers, Martin

[Ian PParticipant @ianp]

I dont want to hijack the thread but I am in the process of reducing my library and yesterday came across a book relevant to the thread. Its ‘Uncommon Metals’ by E.N.Simons.

Ian P

[Martin King 2Participant @martinking2]

Pages 137 & 140 look interesting…! Have to be careful with the chips when turning…

martin

[Martin King 2]

On Martin King 2 Said:

Pages 137 & 140 look interesting…! Have to be careful with the chips when turning…

Can’t help with those pages, but I show you something to do with page 217:

[Martin King 2]

On Martin King 2 Said:

Pages 137 & 140 look interesting…! Have to be careful with the chips when turning…

martin

When I first started work (late 1980’s) I was involved with a manufacturer of very precise lathes. They alluded to having sold several machines into a place in Berkshire where they were installed in an underground bunker. These were for turning hemispheres from page 137. I expect they were very careful with the chips!

(As an aside, it looks like they’re being upgraded: Link)

 

[jaCK HobsonParticipant @jackhobson50760]

Nice site, nice book. I fancy concocting my own steel one day. Very unlikely I will but now I have one less barrier – I know where to get the tungsten and vanadium from. 6KG min quantity will last more than a lifetime.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

making swarf from a lump of metal results in a less compact structure, so if the original lump wasn’t a critical mass you probably won’t go up with a bang. Coolant could act as a moderator so best avoided unless you know what you’re up to. The problem with uranium is that it is pyrophoric, and so swarf is likely to catch fire. It cannot be put out with water, I think they had buckets of sand. Dunno about plutonium. You also very much don’t want to breath in any particulates.

Many tonnes of uranium bar were produced and machined to size for magnox reactors at Springfields near Preston UK.

[duncan webster 1]

On duncan webster 1 Said:

The problem with uranium is that it is pyrophoric, and so swarf is likely to catch fire.

On YouTube, there are videos form 1967 or so of experiments surrounding extinguishing plutonium fires. I think they burned some huge amount of plutonium. If you look at the uranium one above, it might come up in the sidebar as a suggested viewing.

There is a lot of stuff from the US about machining and preparing nuclear material, from Hanford, Oak Ridge, etc. They tend to be a lot less secretive about their stuff after 50 years than we do here.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

I may be wrong but I think the larger health problem is that these two metals in non-enriched form are very poisonous!

Any amount of p36 about – we carry a significant amount of a compound of it, ourselves every day. There is a lot of it, happily married to Carbon and Oxygen, in the landscape too, with some ending up in our kettles or miniature steam-engine boilers!

Quite a number of those metals are of increasing importance now of course, with the drive to make life as electrical and electronic as possible. Many are called “rare earth” but are not actually ever so rare themselves. The difficulty for us is that their ores are scattered thinly, and some are tied up in complex silicates with other metals.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Ingesting uranium (ie getting it into your digestive tract) whilst obviously not good for you, isn’t as bad as you might think as it passes through fairly quickly. Getting it into your lungs or blood stream is a different matter as it stays there and you get long term radiation damage. Back in 1945 a chap called Albert Stevens was injected with a large dose of a radioactive plutonium isotope (a lot more active than natural uranium) . They mistakenly thought he was terminally ill, even so this seems a tad unethical. Despite this he lived for another 20 years, finally dying of heart failure. It might seem I’m trying to minimise the dangers of U and Pu, not so, but there is a lot of misinformation and hype out there.

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