How Its Made Ductile Iron Pipe

Now I want to know the crystal difference between grey iron and ductile iron....oh, magnesium. I wonder how much.

At 1:05, that certainly doesn't look like 'precise amounts' of steel and iron.

The pipe is cast while spinning? That's frickin' cool.

How It's Made Pantyhose

Man, the line at 0:10 is cheesy.

Sorry, just had to pass that along.

In our summer camps, we make nylon from a two-part recipe in a condensation polymerization reaction. The nylon that we make, though, is far from a final, processed, wearable product.

I do wish that there was more of a glimpse at how the nylon is made before it ever becomes a thread, but that's for another video.

General Motors Grand Rapids Stamping Operations

The music's a little cheesy, and the audio narration is non-existent, but the video is interesting in that it shows metal stamping, a relatively straight-forward process. The interesting thing to me, though, is which jobs are being done by people and which are being done by robot, how much of the plant's production is almost entirely automated.

Self healing concrete and asphalt: Erik Schlangen at TEDxDelft

I've watched quite a few TED talks, but I can't remember the last one (before this one, of course) that started with a silent demonstration and liquid nitrogen.

Wait, did he just microwave a piece of asphalt?

Did that asphalt just heal itself?

Oh, snap!

Salzgitter Mannesmann Stainless Tubes - Boiler Tubes

"Energy is life...life is responsibility...responsibility for the future..."

That does seem a little dramatic, but how else are we going to know that Salzgitter Mannesmann's stainless tube manufacturing is the best?

This video is a great show of how boiler tubes are produced. I'm not entirely sure what a boiler tube is (other than the obvious 'a metal tube', smart alleck), but the mixture of animations and live footage to show the process makes things far easier to understand.

The alloying and coating that shows up around 5:00 into the video is some serious steel chemistry.

History of Iron

Nikos Bel-Jon's seven-panel mural of the History of Iron was commissioned by the American Society of Metals (now ASM) in 1953. The panels were moved from ASM's headquarters in downtown Cleveland to their headquarters at Materials Park under the geodesic dome. There they...well, they were wrapped up in paper and stacked on shelves for five or so decades. During the early 2000's renovation, the panels were restored and now hang throughout the ASM headquarters.

The panels are gorgeous, having been 'drawn' with steel wool and metal brushes. When photographed under the right lighting, the panels show a beautiful depth of imagery, a 3d look with no physical depth. More photos can be found on Bel-Jon Studio's website.



More photos from Bel-Jon Studio's website...

Lost Wax Casting Process

The lost wax process has been around for thousands of years and can be used to make anything from tiny rings and jewelry to huge statues.

The process involves a number of steps: making a clay form...creating a rubber or plaster mold...filling the mold with wax...chasing (cleaning and correcting) the wax form...spruing the wax form...dipping the wax into ceramic slurry/sand layers...heating out the wax...heating the ceramic forms...pouring the molten bronze...breaking off the ceramic...polishing and finishing the bronze.

I'm not entirely sure what we're seeing at 4:50 when the patina is being applied. The flat sheet of bronze there certainly doesn't seem to have been made through the lost wax casting process. The bottles in the foreground don't give much of a clue there.

But we do get some bouncy piano music at open and close the video.