titanium

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Hackaday Links: May 4, 2025

May 4, 2025 by 13 Comments

By now, you’ve probably heard about Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe destined for Venus in 1972 that fell a bit short of the mark and stayed in Earth orbit for the last 53 years. Soon enough, though, the lander will make its fiery return; exactly where and when remain a mystery, but it should be sometime in the coming week. We talked about the return of Kosmos briefly on this week’s podcast and even joked a bit about how cool it would be if the parachute that would have been used for the descent to Venus had somehow deployed over its half-century in space. We might have been onto something, as astrophotographer Ralf Vanderburgh has taken some pictures of the spacecraft that seem to show a structure connected to and trailing behind it. The chute is probably in pretty bad shape after 50 years of UV torture, but how cool is that?

Parachute or not, chances are good that the 495-kilogram spacecraft, built to not only land on Venus but to survive the heat, pressure, and corrosive effects of the hellish planet’s atmosphere, will at least partially survive reentry into Earth’s more welcoming environs. That’s a good news, bad news thing: good news that we might be able to recover a priceless artifact of late-Cold War space technology, bad news to anyone on the surface near where this thing lands. If Kosmos 482 does manage to do some damage, it won’t be the first time. Shortly after launch, pieces of titanium rained down on New Zealand after the probe’s booster failed to send it on its way to Venus, damaging crops and starting some fires. The Soviets, ever secretive about their space exploits until they could claim complete success, disavowed the debris and denied responsibility for it. That made the farmers whose fields they fell in the rightful owners, which is also pretty cool. We doubt that the long-lost Kosmos lander will get the same treatment, but it would be nice if it did.

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A SPIF-fy Way Of Forming Metal

March 16, 2024 by 23 Comments

Thanks to 3D printing, most of us are familiar with the concept of additive manufacturing, and by extension, subtractive manufacturing. But what is it when you’re neither adding material nor taking it away to create something? Generally speaking, that’s called forming, and while there are tons of ways to do it, one you might not have heard of is single-point incremental forming (SPIF), and it’s pretty cool.

To explore SPIF as a method for making small parts, [Russell Makes] gave it a go on a small CNC mill. The idea is pretty simple, and the video below makes it pretty clear what’s going on. A forming tool is moved over a sheet metal blank that’s held very securely to the mill’s table. The tool has no cutting edges, just a smooth, hard, spherical tip — [Russell] made his own by brazing a carbide ball to a piece of drill rod. The tool is driven slightly into the blank along the Z-axis, while simultaneously tracing out a tool path in the XY plane. The tool spins, but very slowly; ideally, the spindle speed is controlled to keep a single point of contact with the metal as the tool works around its tool path. The tool steps downward incrementally, drawing the metal down with it as it forms the desired shape.

[Russell]’s experiments were pretty promising. He started with titanium sheet, which behaved pretty well except for some galling thanks to lack of lubrication. Aluminum and stainless worked pretty well too, at least for simple hemispherical and cone shapes. More complex shapes proved trickier, but with time he was able to figure out the correct speeds and feeds to keep the metal intact. The amount of tension built up in the metal is impressive, though, and is especially evident when cutting the finished part free from the blank.

Could this work with a hobbyist-grade machine? Possibly, but we’d be afraid that the forces involved might be a bit much for light-duty machines, especially in the Z-axis. And it’s a slow process, so it’s probably only good for one-offs and low-volume work. Once you’ve got a prototype, die stamping might be a more efficient way to go.

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DB Cooper Case Could Close Soon Thanks To Particle Evidence

January 23, 2024 by 47 Comments

It’s one of the strangest unsolved cases, and even though the FBI closed their investigation back in 2016, this may be the year it cracks wide open. On November 24, 1971, Dan Cooper, who would become known as DB Cooper due to a mistake by the media, skyjacked a Boeing 727 — Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 — headed from Portland to Seattle.

During the flight, mild-mannered Cooper coolly notified a flight attendant sitting behind him via neatly-handwritten note that he had a bomb in his briefcase. His demands were a sum of $200,000 (about $1.5 M today) and four parachutes once they got to Seattle. Upon landing, Cooper released the passengers and demanded that the plane be refueled and pointed toward Mexico City with him and most of the original crew aboard. But around 30 minutes into the flight, Cooper opened the plane’s aft staircase and vanished, parachuting into the night sky.

In the investigation that followed, the FBI recovered Cooper’s clip-on tie, tie clip, and two of the four parachutes. While it’s unclear why Cooper would have left the tie behind, it has become the biggest source of evidence for identifying him. New evidence shows that a previously unidentified particle on the tie has been identified as “titanium smeared with stainless steel”.

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Mining And Refining: Titanium, Our Youngest Industrial Metal

December 5, 2023 by 9 Comments

Earlier in this series, we made the case for copper being “the metal that built technology.” Some readers took issue with that statement, noting correctly that meteoric iron and gold were worked long before our ancestors were able to locate and exploit natural copper outcroppings, therefore beating copper to the historical punch. That seems to miss the point, though; figuring out how to fashion gold decorations and iron trinkets doesn’t seem like building the foundations for industry. Learning to make tools from copper, either pure or alloyed with tin to make bronze? Now that’s how you build an industrial base.

So now comes the time for us to make the case for our most recent addition to humanity’s stable of industrial metals: titanium. Despite having been discovered in 1791, titanium remained locked away inside abundantly distributed ores until the 1940s, when the technological demands of a World War coupled with a growing chemical prowess and command of sufficient energy allowed us to finally wrest the “element of the gods” from its minerals. The suddenness of it all is breathtaking, too; in 1945, titanium was still a fantastically expensive laboratory oddity, but just a decade later, we were producing it by the (still very expensive) ton and building an entirely new aerospace industry around the metal.

In this installment of “Mining and Refining,” we’ll take a look at titanium and see why it took us over 11,000 years to figure out how to put it to work for us.

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Generating Motion Via Nitinol Wires

December 2, 2023 by 13 Comments

Generally, when we’re looking to build something that moves we reach for motors, servos, or steppers — which ultimately are all just variations on the same concept. But there are other methods of locomotion available. As [Jamie Matthews] demonstrates, Nitinol wires can be another way to help get things moving.

Nitinol is a type of metal wire made of nickel and titanium that is also known as “memory wire”, because it can remember its former shape and transition back to it with a temperature change. [Jamie] uses this property to create a simple hand that is actuated by pieces of wire sourced from Amazon. This is actually a neat way to go, as it goes some way to mimicking how our own hands are moved by our tendons.

[Jamie] does a great job of explaining how to get started with Nitinol and how it works in a practical sense. We’ve seen it put to some wacky uses before, too, such as the basis for an airless tire.

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Anodizing Titanium In Multiple Colors

May 14, 2023 by 12 Comments

[Titans of CNC Machining] wanted to anodize some titanium parts. They weren’t looking for a way to make the part harder or less prone to corrosion. They just wanted some color. As you can see in the video below, the resulting setup is much simpler than you might think.

The first attempt, however, didn’t work out very well. The distilled water and baking soda was fine, as was the power supply made of many 9V batteries. But a copper wire contaminated the results. The lesson was that you need electrodes of the same material as your workpiece.

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A prosthetic eye anodized green around the edges with a yellow and blue "iris" surrounding an LED center.

Skull Lamp Illuminates The Cyberpunk Future

October 26, 2022 by 11 Comments

Cyberpunk is full of characters with cool body mods, and [bsmachinist] has made a prosthetic eye flashlight (TikTok) that is both useful and looks futuristic. [via Reddit]

[bsmachinist] has been machining titanium prosthetic eyes for over five years now, and this latest iteration, the Skull Lamp, has a high brightness LED that he says is great for reading books at night as well as any other task you might have for a headlamp. Battery life is reported as being 20 hours, and the device is switched by passing a magnet (Instagram) near the prosthetic.

We love seeing how prosthetics have advanced in the last few years with the proliferation of advanced tools for makers. Some other interesting prosthetics we’ve covered are this DIY Socket for Prosthetics with a built-in charger and power supply and several different prosthetic projects for kids including these Heroic Prosthetics by Open Bionics, the E-Nable Alliance, and a Kid Who Designed his Own Prosthetic.

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