In USA, the term "pot metal" has been around for a very long time. Mostly zinc but with who-knows- what also mixed in there. It's not a consistent recipe.
IS good enough for low-stress housings and such however and easy to cast/machine. Better than plastic but not as good as decent aluminum or steel alloy. HAS it's place IMHO.
I think I have seen motors used in kitchens have very cracked metal housings. Probably this pot metal.
Yes. As someone else said, we didn't call it 'muckite' for nothing. It is a very cheap way to do reasonably high finish castings. Was used a lot for e.g. 'Dinky/corgi Toys'
Also a lot for low grade industrial casting as you have noted. Now rather more likely to have been replaced by plastic in e.g. car thermostat housings
The late, great, Terry Pratchett wrote of "Narrativium", which he said was the raw material from which stories are constructed.
... there's also "Corium", which is the name given by nuclear engineers to the the material created in the core of a nuclear reactor that is (inadvisedly) allowed to melt down ... as has happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
I guess it's time to revive this old chestnut:
Thu Apr 19 05:56:05 1990 Message : #583740 From: snipped-for-privacy@bode.ee.ualberta.ca Group : NET.Humour Length : 299 words Subject : New Element Discovered!!
Msg-ID: snipped-for-privacy@bode.ee.ualberta.ca>
Posted: 18 Apr 90 19:17:59 GMT
Org. : University of Alberta Electrical Engineering Person: Kees denHartigh
New Element Discovered at NRC Research Centre
The heaviest element know to science was recently discovered by Physicists at the NRC Research Center. The element, tentatively named Administratium, has no protons or electrons and thus has an atomic number of 0. However, it does have 1 neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistant vice neutrons. This gives it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together in a nucleus by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons.
Since it has no electrons, Administratium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction with which it comes in contact. According to the discoverers, a minute amount of Administratium caused one reaction to take over 4 days to complete, when normally it would occur in less than 1 second.
Adminstratium has a normal half life of approximately 3 years, at which time it does not actually decay, but instead, undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that the atomic weight actually increases after each reorganization.
Research at other laboratories indicates that Administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as Government agencies, large corporations, universities and NRC. Administratium can be found in the newest, best maintained buildings.
Scientists point out that Administratuim is known to be toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reactions where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how Administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.
Kees denHartigh snipped-for-privacy@bode.ee.ualberta.ca Electrical Engineering Digital Labs alberta!bode!kees University of Alberta 238 Civil Elect Voice (403)492-5421 Edmonton, Alberta Canada Fax (403)492-1811
But Corium is real and exists. And nasty
Very likely - and I've seen such cheap motors before.
The alloy does not seem very resistant to vibration. It's soft enough you'd THINK it would be, but its not.
Most aluminum alloys and 300 series stainless are not super-good with vibrations either - though better than 'pot metal'. I've seen 'magnesium' tire rims crack too.
Only steel - esp nearly pure iron - seems to stand up to vibration, but it's HEAVY. Some cast iron, like that previously used for engine blocks, can be pretty good but will fracture on a sharp impact. I've seen old cracked engine blocks too.
Plastics - they start 'crystalizing'/decomposing the instant they're made.
So, alas, nothing 'perfect'. Not sure about titanium alloys but they're way too expensive and hard to work for most applications. Hey, pure gold doesn't stress harden/fracture ! :-)
The problem is mainly that its has no fixed composition, Its random non ferrous scarp mainly. Use a magnet to get the iron and steel and melt what is left over perhaps
Pot metal is heavy and brittle in my experience.
Came across it back in the day in toys, carburettor castings, thermostat housings..valve covers..all stuff that needed shape retention but no great strength
Cast iron is brittle.That's why they used to use wrought iron - but it was expensive. Then making steel got super cheap and that was that. Whole generation learned to treat and alloy steel to get almost whatever you want
Not all of them. Like steel, there is a huge range. There's many a radio case made of 'Bakelite' or stuff skinned with 'Formica' or floored with 'linoleum'....still functioning
Epoxy and glass fibre PCBs dating from the 1970s are still OK, as are phenolic resin items
PVC however is very short lived, In the sun
Nylon is intermediate - UV ageing often gets it
Jury is still out on polycarbonate, ABS and ASA.
In fact one of the eco gripes about plastics is that they *don't* degrade.
Nevertheless there are plastic gobbling bugs thriving at the bottom of the sea apparently, eating all those microplastics.
Beware the SweepingStatement...
PVC is used here for window frames and blinds. I had a place with such,
40 year old, and good. Yellowish, though. And more brittle.They fragment into microplastics.
That's UPVC - treaqted to reduce the effect, but not eliminate it
Thermosets are cross-linked and more stable than thermoplastics.
Thermoplastics are a different animal. I worked briefly for a company that made polystyrene foam disposable dinnerware. One advantage of thermoplastics is you can regrind your mistakes. The blowing agent was Freon-12 and the company bought it by the railway tank car. That's another 'was' company on my resume, to say nothing of the CFC process.
Either becomes more brittle - or decomposes into goo, depending on the exact formula. UV-blocking additives help but they're not "forever".
Bakelite ... holds up for quite awhile, esp indoors, but still does become more brittle. If you come across old Bakelite table radios from the 30s and 40s it's very common to see cracks and chips missing.
Polycarbonate dies under UV exposure. Clear becomes cloudy and then brittleness sets in. On the plus it's fairly cheap.
Oh no - DOOM !!!
IMHO most of that is something LAWYERS fabricated so they can sue corps for diseases everyone has always gotten anyway.
Many of the plastics we now use were invented way back in the 50s - which means both that 'exposure' has been VERY long and the performance is well known.
One of my big concerns is how 'construction' plastics like epoxy resins are used. Remember the big tunnel in Boston where they hung a ridiculously heavy concrete panel roof from epoxy-mounted bolts ?
(what mob-connected bunch specced a 4-inch concrete ceiling for a tunnel already made of concrete ?)
UPVC is *Unplasticized* PVC. It is specifically NOT treated with those additives that make other PVC materials flexible.
UPVC does contain fillers, especially Titanium Dioxide, which are added during manufacture for various reasons, one of which is to reduce UV damage to the PVC itself (but also to increase rigidity and reduce cost).
Yes ... but the formation of the word is similar. It is a jokey made-up name that suggests that it is a pure substance, when it is actually an ad-hoc mixture of nuclear fuel, moderator, reactor wall materials, concrete, and random s*it that happened to get in the way when the reactor melted.
As you say: Nasty. I wouldn't use the elephant's foot from Chernobyl as an umbrella stand!
hardly jokey and all names are 'made up...
Curium is a synthetic radioactive chemical element with the symbol Cm and atomic number 96. Named after scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, it was first produced in 1944 by bombarding plutonium with alpha particles. It is also the name of a major global radiopharmaceutical company
Selenium. Named after the noon because it was found along with tellurium, meaning Earth...
Tungsten: Derived from Swedish (tung + sten) because the mineral ore is very dense and heavy.
Wolfram (Chemical Symbol W): Comes from the mineral wolframite. The name originates from German tin miners. They called it wolfram because the mineral hindered tin extraction by "devouring" the tin like a wolf eats a sheep (wolf + ram/foam)
and so on....
Corium comes from a reactor CORE
nothing jokey about it
Unobtanium follows the same rules, and the joke is that the first part means it doesn't exist or cant be sourced.
Like fairy farts and unicorn dung
There is humour in the naming, if not in the substance itself. Don't you agree? Each to his own, I suppose.
Yes, all names are made up, at some level. That's really beside the point I was making and I'm sorry I mentioned it.
Indeed, but these are all pure substances and naming them makes some sense.
The joke lies in naming it in a way that suggests it's a well-defined pure substance.
Now, if, say, it were found that the material resulting from a reactor meltdown typically contained some new element with a higher atomic number than Oganesson (which Wikipedia tells me is the highest that has been discovered, and more relevantly named, so far) it would not be jokey to name that element Corium. Giving an element-sounding name to an ad-hoc mixture is a joke.
Or rocking-horse droppings.
Nothing in the suffix suggest that
Ammonium?
It does indeed have a long history.
The original (and most common) usage is as an unavailable part which renders a whole unavailable, as, for example: “We could fix it if we had a blastercock stabilizer, but they’re made of unobtanium.”
The valuable material extracted from the world of Avatar was “unobtainium”—a nice geek callout which apparently levitated.
Also, the material that the craft was made from in “The Core” (2003).
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required