This could possibly be the worst possible prize. Raw tungsten isn’t actually that expensive. What’s expensive is working with it as it melts 3,410c (6,170f) isn’t very malleable and is heavy like really really heavy to move this block you will probably need larger equipment than standard industrial moving equipment, bigger trucks and loaders also you’ll need to get the city’s permission to haul it on the roads , that alone is probably going to cost more than the cube is worth you will then have to pay a monthly storage fee until someone wants to buy it. Shouldn’t be that long right? It’s a valuable metal… well good luck finding a company that works with tungsten outside of china, and you absolutely can not ship it. But let’s assume you find someone who wants it(at a considerable discount) well now you have to higher the specialized movers again.
EDIT:
Actually I just did the math and plugged in all the known values I could find and assuming you could sell it within the first year you could probably make $700,000, so it would still be well worth it. But a lot of trouble.
I wonder if there’s a foundry in the world with a crucible that can hold, melt, and pour that much tungsten? To make a 5 foot solid cube.
Then imagine trying to machine the damn thing square.
but what if I want one 🥺
too bad, no giant cube of tungsten 4 u
Then good news you can buy it! But you’ll have to commission it’s very specialized construction, and pay to have it shipped across seas… you know that thing I said you absolutely could not do, well with money all things are possible.
Rocket nozzles are commonly made of tungsten, there are more than a few manufacturers in the US. Drill bits can be made of tungsten carbide. Armor piercing weapons use tungsten too. All of these have industries in the US.
Spoken like a true tungsten connoisseur.
The company I worked for made tungsten nozzles, they had to be welded using atomic hydrogen welding. One day a bottle of hydrogen shows up and receiving rejected it, we had the supplier label it protium and it went right through.
Drill bits are coated in tungsten carbide. Sometimes. There are a variety of coatings.
The drill bits you’re buying at the big box store are high speed still with some kind of coating to help them last a little longer. The specialty drill bits you’re buying for working on metal are also HSS with a different coating and probably different tip geometry.
End mills are milling/lathe inserts can be HSS or carbide, also with some tungsten coating. Importantly, these are sintered, and made out of dust.
Tungsten carbide is waaaay too brittle to work as a drill bit.
https://drillbitsusa.com/product-category/solid-carbide-drill-bits/
You don’t use solid carbide drill bits with a hand drill but with mills and cnc machines.
Like, no. All sorts of carbide bits, including drill bits.
Lot of tungsten producers and recyclers in the US, kennemetal for instance. They would be happy to come get that cube, might have to crack it into smaller pieces.
Don’t forget having to pay income tax on the original retail value of the cube (assuming this is USA where lottery and prizes are taxable gains)
Can you expand on why it can’t be shipped?
That would violate the Treaty of Versailles
The Catholic Church passed an edict worldwide banning the shipping of tungsten cubes larger than half a cubic meter in volume
Real answer is that it’s obscenely heavy
Secret clause in the Molotov - Ribbentrop pact
It’d weigh 75 tons assuming that to be 5ft x 5ft x 5ft
It looks like panels on a frame and not solid tungsten.
Just imagine placing this in the front yard as an ornament and watching it sink into the ground from its weight.
Assuming that’s a meter cubed it weighs 19 tons, or 65 tons for 1.5m³
I’m seeing $30,000 per ton there (as of 2018) so wouldn’t the cubic meter cost about $645,000?
They misplaced the comma or used a weird system distinct from the Western or Indian one
It’s being teleported to your location as we speak. I hope you don’t mind it would redesign a couple of floors below you.
I like how there’s so many comments about the value of the cube, and no two comments have the same value.
I mean if you get it in bulk it might be cheaper… but at the same time that would probably be really hard to make and take a major portion of the tungsten supply to make.
I only buy my tungsten cubes on black Friday, you’re a sucker otherwise.
Let’s say that cube is 4.5’ a side. That’s 91.125 cu ft. Tungsten weighs 1,201.738 lb/cu ft. Which means the cube weighs 109,508.38 lb.
That’s an impressively sturdy floor.
Currently, tungsten is selling at about $340 USD/ton.
The block weighs 54.7542 tons.
So this is indeed a decent prize at $18,616 USD.
All you have to do to claim your prize is get it home.
Edit: corrected to a less whelming but still difficult to transport prize thanks to chiliedogg.
You divided by 2 instead of 2000 on your pounds/tons conversion.
Good thing I’m not an accountant
Well this isn’t some mundane detail, Michael!
My immediate response was to do the same calc. But using SI units, because I don’t live in Myanmar or the USA.
I figure that it’s a cube, and judging by the size of the lucky winner, I would guess that the sides are 1.5m. 3.375m^3 at 19.254 g/cm^3 is roughly 65 tons. According to https://www.metal.com/Tungsten/202212260004 tungsten bars are trading for 49USD/kg. IDK where you got 340 USD/ton, but we seem to differ.
65 tons at 49 USD/kg is 3’185’000 USD.
I’d say that a solid homogeneous of tungsten should probably fetch a fair bit more than my price. Casting a cube like that is not going to be easy. Tungsten is rather reactive in the molten form, and has to be kept from air. Just alone keeping 65 tons of molten tungsten under a protective layer of inergen gas is going to be challenging.
No idea why the difference in price. I checked again and it still shows $340/ton on a UK site, another shows $335/ton, some higher for powders or carbide, some way lower for scrap.
I just looked it up; assuming that thing’s about 5ft³, that thing is worth like $54,000. Granted, you’re going to need somebody to come haul it off, but at 10.66k per cubic foot, I’d say it’s not a bad prize.
I see why he’s smiling
Why the heck are you giving an llm a math problem?
Yeah pretty sure everything people are using llms to calculate can be calulated easily with wolfram alpha.
Edit: ive checked yes you just type it in and it does it for you, and it says 3million instead of 2.6 and i will trust wolfram not chatgpt
Lazy
LLMs can’t actually do math…
They can do it better than I can at 7 am. I just sit there and drool looking at my screen
Well that seemed to be perfect, doesn’t chat gpt outsource its math to Wolfram Alpha or something now?
Wolfram is Latin for tungsten so I’d trust it more than anything else
Turns out it managed to do it right this time, so, maybe!
That I don’t know. But regardless, the LLM can’t do it :P
I just asked it and it says that it can.
Checkmate.
Yep, read it and weep, haters:
I find it to be very annoying to use for linear algebra, statistics, finance, and differential equations. Mostly because it often makes rounding errors or halucinates a number/process.
Ask it if it can write instructions on how to multiply those numbers without a calculator
It said “yeah”.
Double checkmate.
Damn yo
I can’t debate that
deleted by creator
Assuming that’s about 5x5’, and going by the price of the first tungsten cube found on Google, this would be worth about 15 million dollars. Decent prize of you could move 150,000lb.
Going with your 5’ x 5’ x 5’ size, that should weigh about 132,624 pounds, or about 66.3 tons. The price, as of 2018, was about $30,000/ton. That works out to be about $2M.
Still a pretty heft prize.
Didn’t calculate the price by weight. Just took the number from the 6" cube here and extrapolated from that since it was the easiest math.
https://shop.tungsten.com/tungsten-cube/
The 5’ cube is 1000 times the size of the 6" cube and the 6" cube is $15k. The prices don’t scale up linearly though. The smaller cubes are better value by weight.
I’ll make my own cubes! Will a sawsall get through that motherfucker?
Of course! It’s “saws all” not “can’t saw tungsten”!
It’s about letting go…
Hmmm.
So the real game show is getting value out of the prize.
Welcome to another exciting episode of CAN! YOU! FENCE THIS?!?!*
Alright contestants, this week your prize is: 600 tons of wood chips! Whoever earns the most money selling your prize will be our lucky winner and move on to round 2.
Reminds me of an impromptu back and forth prank a set of brothers used to pull on each other where they regifted each other a pair of hideous moleskin pants in increasingly elaborate ways.
I’d watch the fuck out of that.
I think I’m going to pitch it to the History channel. Maybe see if I can get Jason Murphy on board.
“Welcome to Can You Fence This, the game show about finding buyers for valuable yet burdensome objects. Ordinary contestants will compete to unload their consignments for the most money without destroying public infrastructure.”
Shoot it in Nevada, lots of establishing shots of the cast standing with their arms folded in very orange light.
Best I can do is a copy of Battletoads
About the same as me winning a giant-ass dinette and patio set for my moderate-sized apartment.
Typically people take the cash value on prizes like that. Because not inly do you have to figure out what to do with what you won, you also have to pay taxes on the value of it.
Melt it.
Wait…
Eat it!
Bop it
Flick it!
Pull it!
Suck it! (¬‿¬)
Twist it!
Nobody doesn’t like molten tungsten!
Unless there is some clause talking about time to receive or “only the participant”, then I would sell this thing at a fraction of the price and frolic into the sunset. Let someone else deal with the logistics, I just made an easy Mil.
this would be worth about 15 million dollars
But where and to whom?
In reall units and currencies thats about 68 tonnes (or around 50 VW Golfs) and 13,8 Million Euros (or 1/11000 of the money we lost due to cum-ex).
2/10 Prize 8/10 Prize if delivery is included
I can put it in the front yard, spray paint it gold, and start a neighborhood cult around The Cube.
You ain’t putting it anywhere. It’s getting delivered and staying where they put it.
A single 5 foot cube of tungsten would weigh about as much as an above average sized single family home.
I assume dumped on the yard would be the only delivery option.
Lol it looks even a decent forklift maxes out at 70k lbs
That cube would be in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars of tungsten
That is… surprisingly little. Are you sure?
I mean, I can only estimate it’s size from the person standing next to it. From there I can use that estimate to get the volume of the cube, then the weight, then look up the cost by weight right now and apply the average.
So it would be somewhere around 1mm by weight.
By weight probably, for it to be a perfectly symmetrical cube would likely cost you double that.
I’m betting I got it a few months before someone can gather the equipment to steal it. It would have outlived its novelty and likely be a burden at that point. If the cult works out The Cube should be self sufficient and could even become a profitable local attraction.
A tungsten cube that size would weigh a fuckload.
To just deliver it would be an undertaking. There will be roads between you and the where ever this came from that are not rated for that weight.
You may need a specialized truck just to move it, and a crane to get it on and off said truck…
If they won’t deliver The Cube at their expense, they should have given out a more reasonable prize.
It’s a challenge prize.
“Oh you think you won The Cube? Then come and get it”.Then three months later a new person wins The Cube.
Just get egyptians to move it
How does one join the cult for The Cube?
One must simply gaze upon the glory of The Cube. The Cube will invite you in, keep you warm, keep you safe. The Cube welcomes all. The Cube just wants to share.
Cube!
Cube is life.
Holy shit Tom is rich now! If he can move it though.
How did they put it on the stage?
They built the stage around the cube.
They grew the Earth around the cube.
The Cube has always been there. The Cube is eternal. All hail the Cube.
The cube came from the skies, the visitors brought it.
Spawned it in with a console command.
I unironically want this
Me too. It’s worth over $1 million.
But the guy above said fif… You know what, I’ll give you $1 million.
To be fair, these estimates here are just guessing the actual size and composition of that cube. Still, that’s a lot of tungsten.
NCD would probably be delighted to have something that can be turned into multiple rods from god
You know those degens would also use those rods as a sex toy.
If I had one of those in my living room, my house would collapse.
I really wanted to use Tungsten as the base ballast for a custom narrowboat, for better headroom. Other than the cost you also have the problem of tungsten’s melting point being so high you can’t pour it into a boat hull without melting through.
You also can’t melt it in general outside of some high tech magnetic field induction chambers, as doing so would melt the furnace in most cases.
Almost all industrial applications of tungsten involve electrochemistry or otherwise the mixing of fine tungsten dust.
Aircraft use tungsten ballast plates. I know it requires hardware, but would that have been viable?
Possible but the expense ruined my plans in the end… I did consider collecting broken tungsten end mills and inserts from machine shops and throwing them in molten lead, like croutons in a lead soup.
If I understand it right, you’d get mostly cobalt that way. Carbide tooling isn’t solid tungsten or silicon carbide but carbide powder embedded in cobalt.
