this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] moshankey 7 points 2 months ago (6 children)

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!

[–] Eheran 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

While I agree, I do have to clarify that 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

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

...my steel frame split at the welds fourty-five years ago; my bonded aluminum frame has ridden out building fires with nary an issue...

[–] Maalus 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

not to defend Alluminium (bleh), but that's likely a production error, bad hydroforming, bad welds... at least it's not CF!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

And now I'm back to looking at steel (and titanium) adventure hardtails...

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

All the Simpsons fans out there know how great Zinc is.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Okay starkiller.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Thorium master race.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Uranium is the one true metal

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Punching strangers in the face can get expensve.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago
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