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How To Tell If It's Really Titanium
With the growing popularity of titanium, some disreputable merchandisers are passing off other materials as the more expensive metal. Popular Science looks at a surefire way to prove what that credit card/crowbar/ring is really made of. "Hold any genuine titanium metal object to a grinding wheel (even a little grindstone on a Dremel tool will do), and it gives off a shower of brilliant white sparks unlike any softer common metal. The sparks are tiny pieces of cut titanium--the friction of the grinder heats them till they burn white-hot. Hold a grindstone to the shackle of a "titanium" padlock from Master Lock, however, and you'll instead see the telltale fine, long, yellow sparks of high-carbon steel."
The method in TFA sounds like it would really scratch up whatever you're trying to test. Is there a way to run a test without damaging the object?
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Think the store will mind if I bring a dremel with grinding wheel to the store with me? For testing purposes of course...
A Human Right
Wtf is with these fake links? Do you get money or something for that stupid city?
Apparently my wife's jewelry was all genuine titanium!
If the object in question is constructed from a single material, then a density test should work. Use water displacement and a scale to determine the volume and mass, respectively. From that you can calculate the density and compare the value to the actual density of titanium. Of course, this won't work if the object merely has titanium components and it cannot be disassembled. . .
The author of this Popular Science article, Theo Gray, also recently relaunched http://www.periodictable.com/ Thousands of elemental pictures and videos are available there, all linked in with his Popular Science series.
Man, I just tried this with a new package of Energizer Tianium, and the spray burned a hole through my skin!
You can be sure I'll be returning these "titanium" batteries just as soon as I'm back from Emergency!
a: Titanium is not ferromagnetic, and hence it is not attracted by magnets as strongly as iron is ( the difference in force should be orders of magnitude ).
b: Titanium's density is 4.5g/cm^3 , iron is 7.8g/cm^3
c: Titanium is corrosion resistant to dillute sulfuric and hydrochloric acid, iron is not.
Next up: Test if your explosives have gone bad by detonating them.
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Apparently, Google has "interesting" sense of humor regarding titanium products.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I read a story about a couple who loved bicycling (and loved their titanium bicycle frames). They decided to have rings made from titanium.
One day the guy had some kind of accident, and his ring finger was mashed; it swelled up badly. They took him to the emergency room. In the ER, someone got out the cutters to cut the ring off the swollen finger. Whoops, titanium. The cutters (probably simple diagonal cutters) had no problem with the usual soft gold rings, but titanium was too hard! They wound up getting a Dremel tool or the equivalent and cutting the titanium ring off (very carefully, I imagine).
The moral of the story: if you get a titanium ring made, maybe you should wear it like a necklace.
P.S. Merry Christmas everyone.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
...iron is always magnetic.
That is a big fallacy. There are some alloys in which iron is around 98-99% which are non-magnetic (think unusual alloying elements like niobium and rhenium).
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Gloves + rotating grinder = BAD. You don't want a glove to get caught in that, your hand goes with it. Better to be burned by some sparks than to lose a few fingers (at best).
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MERRY CHRISTMAS!
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If you were testing Adamantium, those sparks were probably from your grinding wheel being worn down to a nub.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Iron isn't always magnetic, when heated to or above it's normalization temperature it loses it's magnetic properties, you can hold a piece of steel suspended with an electrimagnet in a kiln and heat it, when it reaches it's normalization temp it will fall to the kiln floor.
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You don't even need that much heat. Just warm it in your hands, and if you get a faint pine smell it's amber.
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Depends on the type of stainless. Austentitic is not ferromagnetic, while martensitic is.
Titanium is a woman's metal. Real men use Tungsten.
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And in fact, some soldering iron thermostats use this property. When the iron is cold, a magnet pulls the contact closed. Once it heats above the Curie point, the magnet lets go and the contact breaks.
someone please tell me how to tell if there's real platinum in my Capital One® platinum Card, I always want to know.
Shitcock
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
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Sorry, that's not my understanding of the metal's properties. I guess for digging around in the sand, you don't really need a fine edge, but nothing to my knowledge compares to the ability of steel (esp. high-carbon steel) to hold an edge. High-carbon steel is very brittle, which helps it to hold an extremely sharp edge; this is why Japanese samurai swords were forged to have one side harder than the other side, so the sharp side would be extremely hard, but the other side would be less hard and more strong (done by using clay on one side during quenching) so that the blade as a whole wouldn't break easily.
There's a reason no other knives are made of titanium, or anything besides steel for that matter.
Titanium is known to be a very strong metal. If you know anything about metallurgy and its terminology, strong and hard are different properties, and usually work against each other: a metal is usually strong, but not hard, or vice versa, not both. Steel can be made to be hard, but brittle, or strong (which is more flexible) but not very hard.
Anyone with a titanium ring knows that it's not a hard metal at all: it's easily scratched unless it has a protective coating (usually diamond). Sure, it might prevent a automatic pressure door on an undersea rig from locking you in, but it doesn't hold a sharp edge at all.