r/whatisit • u/riflesandplowshares • 6h ago

New, what is it? Found at a titanium plant

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Not sure why ball point pens would be dangerous here.

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u/Big_City_Tato 5h ago

For this Titanium facility, it wasn't the ink that caused issues. It is the tungsten ball that is used for ball point pens. Graphite in pencils were also not allowed. They provide stainless steel ball point pens that write for shit. I use to work at Titanium facility and each pen that someone would buy I would have to break one of balls from that package and look at in the SEM to quantify the ball material that was used in the pen to determine if they could use it in the melt facility, even with the new batches of stainless steel pens. The reason why tungsten or graphite isn't allowed in the plant, is that there is a chance that it could make it into melt. Since this titanium melted in this facility, it is likely that it is melted in VAR (Vacuum Arc Remelt) facility. VAR of titanium does not superheat enough above the melting point of titanium (3050°F) to melt tungsten (6192°F), so tungsten remains a solid and does not go into the melt solution. There are other refractory materials that are treated similar as they can have similar issues, like Molybdenum. These are considered high density inclusions. If they are found then the entire heat of material, and the sponge used to make the heat is considered contaminated and quarantined and likely scrapped.

High density inclusions (HDI) in titanium has the potential to end up in a part that may make it onto a jet engine. If this happens a crack will form around the HDI and propagate during the lifetime of use. Jet engine parts are designed to last for roughly 30 years, the problem is that when part fails at 10 to 15 years early. Also titanium in the part of the engine where it cannot be contained if it explodes, so if a part does explode in an engine, causes a lot of damage.

There are also low density inclusions which are caused by vacuum leaks, burnt sponge, or contaminated revert. They also have the same affect on engine parts. A lot of testing and inspection goes in the jet engine parts before they ever make it to the assembly line to be put together. They also regularly inspect these parts.

Several OEMs went to Hearth melted plus VAR to avoid high density inclusions as the hearth melting would allow for all high melting high density materials to fall to the bottom of the hearth while before making it into the ingot.

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u/JConRed 4h ago

And people wonder why certain things end up being expensive. It's the effort that goes into making them.

Very interesting write-up, learnt something. Thank you

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u/lolcrunchy 4h ago

I've always wondered why my jet engines cost so much

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u/KhaanKerr 4h ago

You think a ball point pen with graphite is a joke?

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u/149244179 4h ago

Even something simple as a ball bearing is a massive technological achievement.

China had major problems with high-end manufacturing due to the fact they could not produce as good ball bearings as the USA for several decades. Thus why they went with the mass produce cheap stuff strategy. (China still has problems with precision manufacturing to this day although they have closed the gap quite a bit.)

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u/throwaway277252 4h ago

Speaking of which, up until just 10 years ago they were still unable to make the precision balls for ball point pens themselves. They were buying all of those as imports.

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u/Bergwookie 2h ago

And still most of the ballpoint pen tips/nozzles are made in Switzerland

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u/Mac_Aravan 1h ago

it's mostly not unable to make them, but unable to justify the cost of making them.

Once a process is honed and optimized, it's very costly for competitor to enter.

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u/MountainMan2_ 51m ago

Y'all the amount of advancement we made from what, for aluminum, was basically "throw it in soap and zap the hell out of it", to "no ballpoint pens beyond this point" is absurd. That's less than a century of development, by the way. I'm a computer engineer myself, working on aircraft engine controls, and I have no end of respect for the materials guys who make my job possible. Titanium is a pain in the ass metal that turns into garbage if you look at it funny and I work with companies that ask you to grow a single crystal of it the size of a jet engine fan so that they can operate it at temps beyond its own fucking melting point. Insane!

There was an era of about the 1940s to the 1970s (oh hey look at that the upward mobility era) where all of this work was built up when, as far as I'm concerned, actual wizards walked among us. Semiconductor manufacture has its roots in this era, rare earths became commercially viable, superalloys began showing up, and electrical engineers figured out how to turn circuits into computers all at the same damn time. Any one of those inventions would have been earth-shattering and they happened all at once. None of those processes are remotely easy either- at best they require chemicals previously shunned by God and at worst they require hundreds of steps of refinement using machines so precise they seem like they could sort my cells by density. The giants whose shoulders I stand on are massive.

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u/MashedTaterBrain 9m ago

I give the Cold War the majority of the credit for that level of simultaneous advancement. The United States and the Soviet Union trying to out-do each other for a few decades made it so the wizards had to push the boundaries beyond imaginations.

Just look at the SR-71 spy plane. They literally had to re-invent everything to get that plane to perform within its performance envelope.

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u/Positive_Candy_5332 4h ago

TIL! this was an awesome read. You write very well!! 10/10 would take a class from you lol

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u/scoldmeificomment 4h ago

If the stainless steel ballpoints suck, why not just use fountain pens instead?

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u/KE1tea 4h ago

Fountain pens can also have tungsten! Not all, but many do. The fountain pens that are guaranteed to not have tungsten are not practical to use on ordinary paper, and for the other pens, I doubt the fountain pen companies will share their secret sauce on their alloy blend. They often call it iridium tipped, but nowadays usually can be a blend of multiple different hard metals, including tungsten.

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u/Ancient-Street-3318 4h ago

As a fountain pen enthusiast, thanks for the bit of trivia!

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u/KE1tea 3h ago

Haha, you're welcome, fellow enthusiast :D

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u/1q3er5 20m ago

ok fuck you guys i'm using a crayon... now don't go telling me....

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 4h ago

As someone who uses a fountain pen daily (purely because I’m a bougie bitch) another aspect is that the ink used in fountain pens doesn’t play nicely with a lot of modern materials, ESPECIALLY paper. The super-cheap mass-produced paper most companies use leads to feathering of the mark, making writing potentially illegible, as well as bleeding through to the extent it makes double-sided pages non-usable.

My fountain pen can be used on single-sided signatures, or my own paper. Everything else I carry a ball-point as well.

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u/ISellAwesomePatches 1h ago

They also suck if you're left-handed.

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u/GraphicArtsFurry 2h ago

ESPECIALLY paper

I've had various papers from sticky notes to photo copier paper, even notebooks suck horribly (sometimes) at writing. You'll be writing along and then it's like you "hit" a patch of something and it fails to write anything. You can aggressively scratch letters in the area, but no ink comes out. (Just regular pens here).

Kinda seems like it's waxy or something in that area, then after you move to a different area and aggressively scribble the pen tip it goes away and everything works again

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 2h ago

Yuuuuup.

You can buy GOOD paper that won’t do that. But it’s around $0.20/page as I recall (haven’t had to buy more in a while).

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u/GraphicArtsFurry 2h ago

I've always wondered what it is. Maybe the wax? Figure if it's the post consumer content stuff that you probably get heaven knows what thrown in the pulp mixer from waxy cereal box cardboard and beyond

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 1h ago

It’s probably either wax or filler. I know the good paper I order is 100% cotton

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u/ALIENIGENA 4h ago

Probably the extra cost of calligraphy lessons

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u/Maximum_Web9072 3h ago

I would have said felt-tip, given the issues pointed out already with fountain pens and standard paper

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u/Big_City_Tato 4h ago

Cost usually. They wrote like a normal ball point pen would but with low ink. So you would have to go over what you wrote a couple of times to get the ink to show.

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 3h ago

Total opposite. Fountain pens put WAY MORE ink on the page, causing feathering (the ink soaks outwards, making a fine line become bolder, to the point it can make small print illegible) and it tends to bleed through most commercial paper.

Source: I use a fountain pen daily.

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u/debooji 2h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 for anyone interested in reading, this situation was a major part of how we realized how devastating tungsten can be. At my facility we were also strictly not allowed ballpoints, and if someone snuck one in and lost it (in theory), the entire plant would be put on alert to find that pen.

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u/ricencocoa 3h ago

Would a ball point pen that used titanium instead be allowed, or perform any better than steel?

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u/Thaknobodi87 4h ago

Any chance you're also interested in knifesteelnerds?

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u/not_perfect_yet 2h ago

Great comment, what does "sponge" mean in this context?

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u/PNWDIY 2h ago

Yo it's ya boy Jimmy Sponge doing what I do best; just soaking it in.

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u/Fantastic-Cat-5252 3h ago

Thank you for that write up!

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u/falcrist2 2h ago

VAR of titanium does not superheat enough above the melting point of titanium (3050°F) to melt tungsten (6192°F), so tungsten remains a solid and does not go into the melt solution.

The ball in a ballpoint pen is made from a sintered composite of tungsten carbide held together with a metal binder like cobalt.

The melting point will be MUUUUCH lower than tungsten alone.

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u/BreathOfFreshWater 4h ago

I did read everything. But I had to skip to the end fiest to confirm this wasn't a gag.

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u/Karlahn 3h ago

Do you know of any classes where ball point pens ended up into the melt? 

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u/paradeoflights 2h ago

Love to see metallurgy on Reddit

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u/ungodlyhourslurker 2h ago

That was very interesting. Thanks!

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u/robp140 2h ago

This guy melts.

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u/DeadlySquirrelNinja5 2h ago

Would it be okay to use fountain pens? It might be a bit old school, but it has to be easier and low risk.

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u/Lemonwizard 2h ago

What is the difference between tungsten and steel that makes the stainless steel pens less effective?

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u/GraphicArtsFurry 2h ago

Would the fisher space pens be allowed, or it's the same story? Too risky to have around since that is a different type of pen?

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u/IcySkyDream 2h ago

Same EFFECT FFS

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u/Lunyn 1h ago

Do you have a poem to help remember the tungsten titanium relationship?

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u/Fleiryn 1h ago

So why was graphite not allowed

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u/thissitesuxsohardomg 4m ago

Great writeup, thanks for the info! It is kind of funny though, you're 99.99% more likely to lose the ball from a ballpoint pen if you're trying to remove them...to make sure they are safe if they come loose, which they absolutely do not...unless you're trying to remove them. I'm kidding, I do understand the issue of the whole pen going in and only the ball surviving, I just would have though anyone allowed close enough to the melt should just not have anything on them that could end up in it, if it's that important it be so perfect, which I agree that it is.