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
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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.
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!
And now I’m back to looking at steel (and titanium) adventure hardtails…
…my steel frame split at the welds fourty-five years ago; my bonded aluminum frame has ridden out building fires with nary an issue…
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.
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?
Weaker, by like 50%. Welding aluminium isn’t worth it most of the time, just use steel if you need that. Otherwise bolt it together.
not to defend Alluminium (bleh), but that’s likely a production error, bad hydroforming, bad welds… at least it’s not CF!
It was the early 90’s and Raleigh had a line called Technium. The tubes were bonded to the lugs. Not really welded. More pinned and “glued” I guess. The frame broke at either the top or down tube and there went the fork, and my buddy’s face. Screw aluminum. Steel has memory. I found that out the hard way. I’m far from a metallurgist. This is the extent of my elementary teacher brain. And a broken cf seat post is scary.
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
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.
Does that change anything regarding the discussion?
Yes, because the term “fatigue limit” makes lay people think the exact opposite of what is intended.
And i hate Tin…
/sn
Always been more of an iridium man myself
I prefer all my farm tools and weapons to be made out of iridium personally, but that’s just me
Are you dense?
Not as bad as those osmium-heads, plus we’ve got sparkle and color!
I’ll take osmium-heads over degenerates any day.
Okay starkiller.
Together they are thermite!
All the Simpsons fans out there know how great Zinc is.
Mistborn moment
Aluminum is F grade allomantic material.
unless you need to block the allomancy
… Or other investiture
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Cheese is better at blocking Shardblades anyway
I just spent 4 hours renaming every instance of “aluminum” into “aluminium” in a bunch of inventor projects. >.>
Wait, wasn’t sh.itjust.works defederated from hexbear? Why can I see your comment?
It appears that you are posting from a shitjustworks instance
Yup, the commenter is from hexbear.net and I thought the users of an instance whom defederated from another instance, can’t see anything from that instance which got defederated.
My bad misread your comment
Shitjustworks is still federated with hexbear https://sh.itjust.works/instances
Thank you for your service to the objectively superior spelling!
Australian business with australian standards. I wish we had a script for this :(
“Oh, hey guys. Have you heard about this awesome metal called aluminum? I’m so cool I stan a metal that makes up 8% of the weight of the Earth’s solid surface” - a fucking idiot
Don’t get me started on titanium! 🙄
Titanium is awesome, though. Has similar corrosion properties to aluminum (in that it only oxidizes on the surface), is similar in strength to iron/steel, but is only about 60% of the weight iron. So it’s lighter.
Plus if you mix in molybdenum and I think some nickel, you can have yourself a very long lasting spring that won’t sag like steel springs after several years.
Main downside is it’s so expensive compared to iron :(
Plastic for the win? 😁
Soft ass non-magnetic piece of shit aluminum
