Just to be a troublemaker, everyone is assuming this a solid cube, but what if it was something like 1/4 inch tungsten plates and hollow in the middle?
What would it weigh? Would it float in water?
NCD would probably be delighted to have something that can be turned into multiple rods from god
God, I want to drop this thing from orbit on a populated city so much.
Edit: Just as a prank tho.
Dropping anything in orbit just means it is still in orbit.
You’d need a lot of fuel to deorbit that cube on a steep trajectory.
Wouldn’t it be easy to account for the forwards momentum and just lead on the shot?
I’d want to put this in front of the house. No one would steel it ever. lol
Of course not. It’s tungsten. Not steel.
I just looked it up; assuming that thing’s about 5ft³, that thing is worth like $54,000. Granted, you’re going to need somebody to come haul it off, but at 10.66k per cubic foot, I’d say it’s not a bad prize.
I unironically want this
Me too. It’s worth over $1 million.
But the guy above said fif… You know what, I’ll give you $1 million.
To be fair, these estimates here are just guessing the actual size and composition of that cube. Still, that’s a lot of tungsten.
The cube is so heavy, it presses a hole into the floor.
Just imagine plackng this in the front yard as an ornament and watching it sink into the ground from its weight.
Let’s say that cube is 4.5’ a side. That’s 91.125 cu ft. Tungsten weighs 1,201.738 lb/cu ft. Which means the cube weighs 109,508.38 lb.
That’s an impressively sturdy floor.
Currently, tungsten is selling at about $340 USD/ton.
The block weighs 54,754.19 tons.
So this is indeed a fantastic prize at $18,616,425 USD.
All you have to do to claim your prize is get it home.
You divided by 2 instead of 2000 on your pounds/tons conversion.
Good thing I’m not an accountant
Well this isn’t some mundane detail, Michael!
I have a cube of tungsten at work that is 40mm x 40 mm, it is comedically heavy. This thing would be nuts.
I have a cube
That is 40mm x 40mm
Assuming that’s about 5x5’, and going by the price of the first tungsten cube found on Google, this would be worth about 15 million dollars. Decent prize of you could move 150,000lb.
Unless there is some clause talking about time to receive or “only the participant”, then I would sell this thing at a fraction of the price and frolic into the sunset. Let someone else deal with the logistics, I just made an easy Mil.
Hmmm.
So the real game show is getting value out of the prize.
About the same as me winning a giant-ass dinette and patio set for my moderate-sized apartment.
Going with your 5’ x 5’ x 5’ size, that should weigh about 132,624 pounds, or about 66.3 tons. The price, as of 2018, was about $30,000/ton. That works out to be about $2M.
Still a pretty heft prize.
Didn’t calculate the price by weight. Just took the number from the 6" cube here and extrapolated from that since it was the easiest math.
https://shop.tungsten.com/tungsten-cube/
The 5’ cube is 1000 times the size of the 6" cube and the 6" cube is $15k. The prices don’t scale up linearly though. The smaller cubes are better value by weight.
But property is theft, so now you are under arrest
I really wanted to use Tungsten as the base ballast for a custom narrowboat, for better headroom. Other than the cost you also have the problem of tungsten’s melting point being so high you can’t pour it into a boat hull without melting through.
Aircraft use tungsten ballast plates. I know it requires hardware, but would that have been viable?
Possible but the expense ruined my plans in the end… I did consider collecting broken tungsten end mills and inserts from machine shops and throwing them in molten lead, like croutons in a lead soup.
You also can’t melt it in general outside of some high tech magnetic field induction chambers, as doing so would melt the furnace in most cases.
Almost all industrial applications of tungsten involve electrochemistry or otherwise the mixing of fine tungsten dust.
