Can You Forge Tungsten?

My name is Alec Steele. I am a blacksmith, amateur machinist and all-round maker of all-things metal. We make videos about making interesting things, learning about craft and appreciating the joy of creativity. Great to have you here following along!

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[GarrySax]

Nuclear materials scientist here - tungsten is such a dope material, we're actually considering it to make the inner walls of future nuclear fusion tokamaks. It's pretty much one of the only materials on Earth capable of withstanding those 3000°C of continuous exposure without losing much if its mechanical properties. My current work is actually about exploring tungsten 3D-printing and basically laser-welding it to other metals (using kW-range lasers).
Anyway - awesome video, very cool to see you play around with it in a blacksmithing workshop!

[jonasc]

13:30 imagine a 5kg block at 1300 °C launching in your direction with lethal speed. I jumped.

[DingleFlop]

13:30 I HAD A HEART ATTACK!!!! Nothing like a multiple kilos piece of 1300 degree metal flying across the shop at high speed to check the condition of your heart!!!

[KGTiberius]

📍 Tungsten micro folding knife
📍 Tungsten shavings in a steel Damascus
📍 Tungsten logo marking stamp
📍 Tungsten hammer
📍 Tungsten sword Pommels! The extra weight counterbalances an extra long sword.

[ScotlandsGold]

15:27 you made your hydraulic press cry😅

[JackDespero]

As a plasma physicist working on Tokamaks, I am very used to working with tungsten. If you have ever lift a slab of lead, which is surprisingly heavy, tungsten is 50% heavier than lead, so that small piece that looks like you can carry alone, you can't.
Edit: Yep, and 9:31 is exactly what happens when you put it inside a Tokamak.

[Alphaavarice]

I don't usually comment on stuff, but this is an area I have some experience. I'm a machinist and have done a good bit of work with tungsten; mostly weights and bucking bars. Other than being very, very dense and stable I wouldn't really call Tungsten a supermetal. It machines just like cast iron, you use pretty much identical feeds and speeds. As you saw it's quite easy to work with saws and abrasives as well. There's a reason (well, many) that you don't have things like knives made out of pure tungsten. Steel is or can be better in effectively every way. Tungsten is tough but doesn't hold an edge well. It's dense but deforms rather easily, we have to remachine bucking bars made from it fairly often. It's a very cool material but not the wondermetal people often make it out to be.

[Drungra]

The slight forge ability makes me think that Alex should definitely come back to this in the future with some special equipment. Hotter forge, better PPE

[MaxPoulter-qm]

Designer for Formula One here. We use tungsten a lot for counterweights and ballast. This probably isn’t pure tungsten but a tungsten heavy metal alloy (check out AMS 7725). It’s a sintering of ~95% tungsten in a slurry of Nickel iron or copper. It’s the slurry which makes it quite easy to machine as the tungsten never truly fuses together. Making pure tungsten is practical impossible due to the melting point

[andrewevenson]

I used to work in a steel foundry. We didn’t do anything with tungsten steel alloys, but I can tell you those arc furnaces can easily get above the melting point of tungsten. The walls of the furnace are lined with a silicon spray, and it gets eaten away at and dissolves in the liquid steel, and has to be recoated after every heat. The steel walls of the furnace have water flowing through them (though that’s more of an emergency measure if a chunk of silicon falls off the wall and exposes the steel wall to the inside temperatures). Even with the water lined wall, when a hot spot is exposed, it’ll glow red hot from the outside of the furnace and needs to be fixed immediately. Our furnaces were usually charged with 15-20 tons of molten steel at a time. We did large scale castings, and some of our castings were bigger than 10 tons for a single cast piece.

[daudmeer]

15:27 Even the hydraolic press is getting sweaty 😂

[KT-pvkl]

Id like to take a moment to appreciate the over 5000 years of metalworking tradition and the great leaps and advances that we as humans have made to come to a point where somebody in their shop can say "working with hardened steel is not that difficult". Even a few hundred years ago working left alone machining hardened steel would be almost impossible.

[nathanielpoulter]

As a general rule of thumb most metals can be "hot worked" at around the same temperature that they can be sintered or annealled. This is usualy around 0.4-0.6 times their homologus melting temperature (the absolute temperature measured in kelvin). For tungston this would be 1205C-1944C so you should be pretty close. Some metals like lead are at this temperature at "room temperature" so they can be "forged" at room temperature of colder. This is the temperature where the kinetic energy of atoms due to their temperature becomes large enough for them to jump out of their lattice sites and diffuse throughout the crystal. Defects start anihilating and new crystals nucleate and replace stressed crystals (recrystalization) to lower the free energy of the metal by releiving stress and making "brand new" crystals with no imperfections.

Tungston melts at a very high temperature but it is pretty chemically reative (it isn't stable as a reduced "pure" metal) and quickly reacts with gasses in the atmosphere. When it reacts to form oxygen the tungston oxide created has a much lower melting temperature and the molten oxide drips away exposing more metal to react with the air. If you've tried tig welding with no gas you will see something like this.

When you put tungston into molten steel it will make a liquid at a pretty low temperature compared to its metling point. This is because alloys of things will generally "melt" at lower temperatures than pure things. For example salt dissolves into water in small amounts at room temperature, but pure salt melts at about 800 degrees celcius. Iron with different amounts of carbon melts at different temperatures and the lowest melting point is about 4% carbon at about 1200C (which we call cast iron because its so easy to melt). In general this is true because the increase in configurational entropy from additional solute is greater in the liquid phase then the solid phase (liquids are more random than solids this is why they exsist when you heat stuff up and everything starts moving around, adding different types of chemicals in makes it more random and so an alloy will be liquid at a lower temperature). Unless the mixture forms really strong bonds between atoms like sodium and chloride melting at the previously mentoined 800C when sodium would melting in a hot cup of tea and chlorine would be a gas in a deep freezer.

Would be interesting to so the tungston welded in thinner peices (even steel is hard to weld when its that thick). Polarity of the welder would be important to keep the electrode from melting while the workpeice melts.

Edit: I went and found the self diffsuion coeffceints for tungston and calculated the diffusivity as a function of temperature and it looks like it really takes off well after 2000C and I think the oxidation would be pretty bad at that temperature. And this is over the oxides melting temperature so forging tungston in atmosphere doesn't seem likely to me. Also the smoking that alex was shocked by is probably the beginings of this oxidation. Maybe theirs a clever way to heat it electrically and forge it under argon.

[Nerivean]

13:32 an industructible piece of metal flies towards you at 1300 ºC
Alec Steele: *LAUGHS LIKE THE JOKER*

[pandoratheclay]

14:00 don’t do this at home

*puts away hundreds of dollars worth power tools and block of tungsten that I totally have*

[redmadness]

12:34 The smoke coming off of it is tungsten trioxide WO3 I wouldn't recommend breathing it in. The bluish color seen earlier is some other tungsten oxide called tungsten blue

[djingiskhan]

Try heating it via induction. It's pretty easy to set up and it will get the metal to any temperature that you want, you have outlets with more than enough power to make it happen. Great video btw

[stejclfc]

I love Alex warned us not to do this at home, as if the average person might have a massive power hammer knocking about and a £1000 cube of Tungsten XD. Great videos, entertaining as always xxx

[tompotter]

As an engineer trying to understand ways to work with Tungsten -- this is exactly what I wanted to see, thank you it's actually extremely helpful!

[staticmaneuver]

Freelance Baker here—tungsten is such a dope material, I came across it while trying to find ways to improve my baking equipment. Apparently, it’s used in all sorts of high-heat applications, and I’ve started using it to line my bread pans. It’s amazing—bakes everything evenly, and nothing sticks, even at the highest temperatures. I’m also looking into getting a tungsten rolling pin because it’s supposed to give perfect dough consistency thanks to its weight and durability. Honestly, it’s becoming a bit of a secret weapon in my kitchen.
Anyway - awesome video, very cool to see you play around with it in a blacksmithing workshop!