Will Gauge Blocks Wring Together In a Vacuum Chamber?

I test out why gauge blocks wring together. I test it out in a vacuum without oil and with oil.

[adb]

I have a lot of experience working with gauge blocks in a calibration lab. We had different sets of block gauge of different "class". The class defines how perfect the gauge is, and the perfection is measured in terms of the tolerance regarding it's nominal length, but also in the flatness and roughness of the faces. The best gauges has a parallelism + flatness error combined of 0.05 microns, that is 50 nanometers. That's insane. While that is still a few orders of magnitude bigger than the Fe atom, I suppose it has to allow for millions of atom pairs between the 2 blocks to be in very close proximity. What I found is that, when clean of oil, the better blocks have better better adhesion (and sometimes much better, to the point of really struggling to take them apart, the only way was to use another block to push one of them out by sliding sideways). How much of that is because of just better vacuum and how much is because of more atom pairs being in closer contact, I don't know.

[PlasmaChannel]

I would love to see this scaled up to mult-Kg sized items. Would be interesting to push it. Cool viddy.

[danieldevito]

I just learned about "Gauge Block Wringing" 5 minutes before finding this video, and I must say that I'm completely fascinated by this phenomena.

[Ascientistsjourney]

I was always amazed how gauge blocks stick so well. Thank you action lab for answering our silly doubts. 😅.

[AldrichNaiborhu]

These are the types of science projects that I love the most! Simple, yet interesting concepts that are experimented with scientific method, giving us a chance to learn and have fun in the same time.

[minhaophu]

Those blocks just remind me about my old erasers meltdown under hot weather and sticking to everything around it

[theninjapheonix]

someone: actually ask me whether its air pressure, surface tension or the atomic forces keeping gauge blocks together

me: yes

[joemyers]

As i was throwing away some packaging the other day i was wondering what polystyrene looks like in a vacuum chamber.

[NemencioRas]

Yes, all 4 forces : air pressure, oil surface tension, atomic forces ( = coulomb- and, van der Waals forces) the Cassimir Effect.

[calvindlslocum]

I'm a machinist and when I was working in aerospace we used these a lot as standards for our measuring instruments. When we had time to talk to eachother, we would sometimes argue for hours about what it was that kept them together. Some would say vacuum and some would say surface tension. Nice to see someone has solved it.

[robbarnes]

56 years old, and this is the first I am hearing of this! The world is just incredible.

[TheAdvertisement]

I love how there's so many things that just keep two smooth pieces of metal together.

[al-shereiqim]

Could you redo the experiment and attach a gauge + spring resistance to measure the force contribution of each factor? Thanks

[ericbonanno]

I love this. I asked this same question like 11 years ago when I was in vo-tech for tool and die and I couldn't get a decent enough answer. I still wondered because it was so odd to me. Not only there was an ideas of how, there was visual representations of them.

[seanrallis]

I absolutely love your videos. They serve not just as entertaining and educational for me, but my daughter as well. Every one of your experiments that I can afford to do, and is safe, I do with my daughter... I even do some of the less safe ones, with her observing from a point of safety behind a shield.

I love how it makes her ask questions, some of which I had never thought of and didn't know the answers to. From an 8-year-old girl and her dad... thank you. You are the Bill Nye of this generation.

[TheScarletInfector]

I just started a machinery course and we were shown gauge block wringing and I was intrigued. I assumed number 3 was the reason for the bond since the teacher said these ones were in bad shape and needed to be cleaned and polished as there were some near permanent fingerprints on them. Number 3 makes the most sense to me because we know that in a true vacuum with absolutely zero oxygen like metals can contact weld. So this wringing effect as I am making sense of it in my head is like a super small scale velcro between the molecules of the blocks.

[Pizzamampf]

So is it, air pressure, surface tention of oil or atimoc forces?
TheActionLab: yes

[randaranatunga]

Dang
Non magnetic pieces of metal sticking to each other with a lot of force

This is genuinely really interesting

[labiadh_chokri]

Nice experiment, you can measure the contact resistance between them with a milliohmetre if the tow metal touches each other, and if they are separated by a thin oil film they will act as a capacitor.

[periasamypovalingam]

3:06 a whole new level of controlling things in a vacuum chamber and we can use this to do magic tricks. 😆🤣 lol