steel

64 Articles

The supermaterial lattice.

New Supermaterial: As Strong As Steel And As Light As Styrofoam

May 27, 2025 by 63 Comments

Today in material science news we have a report from [German Science Guy] about a new supermaterial which is as strong as steel and as light as Styrofoam!

A supermaterial is a type of material that possesses remarkable physical properties, often surpassing traditional materials in strength, conductivity, or other characteristics. Graphene, for example, is considered a supermaterial because it is extremely strong, lightweight, and has excellent electrical conductivity.

This new supermaterial is a carbon nanolattice which has been developed by researchers from Canada and South Korea, and it has remarkably high strength and remarkably low weight. Indeed this new material achieved the compressive strength of carbon steels (180-360 MPa) with the density of Styrofoam (125-215 kg m-3).

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Vintage Game Rides Again Thanks To Modern Tech

April 18, 2025 by 4 Comments

You have to admire the lengths designers went to back in the day to create engaging games and toys. One particularly clever game of this type was called GEE-WIZ, a horse racing game from the 1920s that seems like it might have been right at home at a bar or pub, and that caught [Michael Gardi]’s imagination enough that he built a modern version of the game.

GEE-WIZ imitates a horse race with an extremely clever mechanism powered by a flywheel on a square shaft. Play is started by pulling a ripcord, which spins up the flywheel to shoot steel balls up six tracks in a gently sloped playing field. The balls hit tin horses riding in each track, pushing them ever further up the track until they trip a flag to indicate the winner. We can practically hear the cheers.

As with many of his other retro-reimaginings, [Mike]’s 21st-century version of GEE-WIZ focuses on capturing the look and feel of the original as accurately as possible. To that end, he put a lot of work into the 3D prints that form the playing field, as well as labels that adorned the original. But the game wouldn’t be much good without the drive mechanism, so [Mike] had to put some work into reverse-engineering the flywheel. He had that machined out of stainless steel and mounted it to the base with some chunky printed bearing blocks. You can see the final product in the brief video below.

[Mike] says that vintage toy recreations aren’t exactly his usual fare, but some might argue that the Sol-20 and Minivac 601 very much count as toys. Either way, we really like the simplicity of GEE-WIZ and the quality of [Mike]’s reproduction.

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Laser-Cut Metal Endoskeleton Beefs Up 3D Prints

January 24, 2025 by 24 Comments

There are limits to what you can do with an FDM printer to make your parts stronger. It really comes down to adding more plastic, like increasing wall thickness or boosting up the infill percentage. Other than that, redesigning the part to put more material where the part is most likely to fail is about the only other thing you can do. Unless, of course, you have access to a fiber laser cutter that can make internal metal supports for your prints.

As [Paul] explains it, this project stemmed from an unfortunate episode where a printed monitor stand failed, sending the LCD panel to its doom. He had taken care to reinforce that part by filling it with fiberglass resin, but to no avail. Unwilling to risk a repeat with a new tablet holder, he decided to test several alternative methods for reinforcing parts. Using a 100 W fiber laser cutter, he cut different internal supports from 0.2 mm steel shim stock. In one case he simply sandwiched the support between two half-thickness brackets, while in another he embedded the steel right into the print. He also made two parts that were filled with epoxy resin, one with a steel support embedded and one without.

The test setup was very simple, just a crane scale to measure the force exerted by pulling down on the part with his foot; crude, but effective. Every reinforced part performed better than a plain printed part with no reinforcement, but the clear winner was the epoxy-filled part with a solid-metal insert. Honestly, we were surprised at how much benefit such a thin piece of metal offered, even when it was directly embedded into the print during a pause.

Not everyone has access to a fiber laser cutter, of course, so this method might not be for everyone. In that case, you might want to check out other ways to beef up your prints, including just splitting them in two.

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The Science Of Coating Steel

September 9, 2024 by 6 Comments

[Breaking Taps] has a look at “parkerization” — a process to coat steel to prevent rust. While you commonly see this finish in firearms, it is usable anywhere you need some protection for steel parts. The process is relatively easy. It does require heat and a special manganese solution made for the purpose. You scuff up the surface of the steel and degrease and wash it.

Once the part is ready, you insert the part in hot solution which is manganese and phosphoric acid. Rinse and displace the water and you are ready to oil the part.

But what we really liked was the electron micrographs of the steel before and after the process. The phosphates formed in the solution cover the iron and hold oil to prevent oxidization. However, the first attempt wasn’t uniform so it wouldn’t work as well. [Breaking Taps] thinks it was a failure to rough up the piece sufficiently before starting. He also raised the temperature of the bath and got a better, but not perfect, result.

We miss having an electron microscope at work and we really want one at home! The last fun coating project we remember used copper in a strange and wonderful way.

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Categorizing Steel

August 18, 2024 by 24 Comments

In the movie Conan the Barbarian, we hear a great deal about “the riddle of steel.” We are never told exactly what that riddle is, but in modern times, it might be: What’s the difference between 4150 and 1020 steel? If you’ve been around a machine shop, you’ve probably heard the AISI/SAE numbers, but if you didn’t know what they mean, [Jason Lonon] can help. The video below covers what the grade numbers mean in detail.

The four digits are actually two separate two-digit numbers. Sometimes, there will be five digits, in which case it is a two-digit number followed by a three-digit number. The first two digits tell you the actual type of steel. For example, 10 is ordinary steel, while 41 is chromium molybdenum steel. The last two or three digits indicate how much carbon is in the steel. If that number is, say, 40, then the steel contains approximately 0.40% carbon.

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Electrical Steel: The Material At The Heart Of The Grid

February 15, 2024 by 32 Comments

When thoughts turn to the modernization and decarbonization of our transportation infrastructure, one imagines it to be dominated by exotic materials. EV motors and wind turbine generators need magnets made with rare earth metals (which turn out to be not all that rare), batteries for cars and grid storage need lithium and cobalt, and of course an abundance of extremely pure silicon is needed to provide the computational power that makes everything work. Throw in healthy pinches of graphene, carbon fiber composites and ceramics, and minerals like molybdenum, and the recipe starts looking pretty exotic.

As necessary as they are, all these exotic materials are worthless without a foundation of more familiar materials, ones that humans have been extracting and exploiting for eons. Mine all the neodymium you want, but without materials like copper for motor and generator windings, your EV is going nowhere and wind turbines are just big lawn ornaments. But just as important is iron, specifically as the alloy steel, which not only forms the structural elements of nearly everything mechanical but also appears in the stators and rotors of motors and generators, as well as the cores of the giant transformers that the electrical grid is built from.

Not just any steel will do for electrical use, though; special formulations, collectively known as electrical steel, are needed to build these electromagnetic devices. Electrical steel is simple in concept but complex in detail, and has become absolutely vital to the functioning of modern society. So it pays to take a look at what electrical steel is and how it works, and why we’re going nowhere without it.

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A Guide For Heat-Treating Steel At Home

December 28, 2023 by 37 Comments

A lot of colloquial words that we might use when describing something’s durability take on extremely specific meanings when a materials scientist or blacksmith uses them. Things like “strength”, “toughness”, “hardness”, and “resilience” all have different meanings when working in a laboratory or industrial setting than most people might otherwise think.

For the beginner metalworker, this can be a little bit confusing at first but some hands-on practice will help. To that end, this beginner lesson in heat-treating steel from [Blondihacks] demonstrates why it can be beneficial to trade some of the metal’s toughness for improved hardness and just how to accomplish it on your own.

The first part of the lesson is to make sure the steel is high-carbon steel, since most other steels aren’t able to be heat treated. It will also have a specific method for its quenching, either in oil, water, or some other medium. But beyond that the only other thing required for this process is a torch of some sort. [Blondihacks] is using a MAP-Pro torch to get the steel up to temperature, which is recognizable when it turns a specific orange color. From there all that’s needed is to quench the hot metal in whatever fluid is called for. At this point the metal can also be tempered, which restores some of its toughness while maintaining a certain amount of hardness.

While the process doesn’t require specialized tools, [Blondihacks] does have a hardness tester, a fairly expensive piece of instrumentation that measures how deeply the metal can be indented by a force. By measuring the size of the indentation made by the tool, the hardness can be determined. As it’s many thousands of dollars this is mostly for demonstration and not necessary for most of us, but does go a long way to demonstrate the effectiveness of heat treating and tempering in an otherwise simple environment. If you’re looking for excuses to start heat treating and tempering metal, here’s a great project which creates a knife nearly from scratch.

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