Unobtanium

Hi Jerry, I would like to thank you and Bob for the opportunity to work with this material. I like it a lot, especially the ability to polish it to a super mirror finish.

I finished the knife thursday and Carol will be photographing it today and putting it up on my web site.

I hope you are not offended by the title of the thread but it is taken from the 1960's motorcycle racing era where us privateers would read about all of the exotic materials like titanium used by the factories in the works bikes that was not available on the open market at any price.
 
I wonder if any of the knifemakers out there who do casting (like David Boye) have seen any of this??
 
Not that I have heard of but I have a sneaking feeling that the casting process is not as simple as your ordinary aluminum or brass casting. Reports that I have read over the last 20 years on amorphous metals have all mentioned need for extremely fast and controlled cooling to prevent crystal formation, that is why amorphous metal in any form is so rare. Until now I thought that it could only be produced in very thin ribbons.
 
Up until about 1993, the formulations for amorphous metals required cooling at about a million degrees kelvin per second which meant there were relatively few manufacturing methods that would work (spinning a glob out on a cooled plate, sputtering the material through a water jet). At Cal Tech they found that by using metal alloys composed of molecules of very different sizes, that they could slow down the movement into crystals, so that the cooling rate was 10's of degrees kelvin per second instead of a million. This still limits the thickness of casting somewhat but opens the door to a much wider range of applications. The per mold cost is (anecdotally) around $25K, and the actual casting equipment is very expensive (hundreds of thousands to millions of $$$).

This is all from memory, but the LiquidMetal thread started by R.W. Clark has all of this in a lot more detail.
 
:( :( :(
Jerry
I was called around that time by someone, I can't remember who now,
about a new type medal??? Dang I hope this isn't what I pasted up
:confused: if it was you guys, I sure would like to try it out...
if I didn't miss the boat:(
 
I started on my LM1 sample today. Scary sparks!

Ron, good sharing some good Scotch with you and Trace and the rest in Oregon. :)

George, are you doing any testing? I thought they wanted some testing done with the samples we recieved.
 
I turned the initial sample into a show piece to introduce it at the Canadian Knifemakers guild show last weekend, good interest by the way. That knife was made up with a Mother of pearl handle and mosaic pins so is not really suitable for test purposes. That one is now in my wife's collection so there is no way that I am going to get it back to chop up bolts and bricks with.

There is more material on the way for destructive testing and a long term test folder that I will be bringing to Atlanta.

Before I take any orders I will satisfy myself that this is the premium material that it appears to be.

I spent some time talking with a military type who had a lot of experience with it punching holes in surplus WW2 Sherman tanks, he doesn't doubt that it will turn out to be a truly superior knife material.
 
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