MAKING A BOWIE KNIFE WITH REAL ENGINEERING!!! PART 1

I get that much of your personal taste in enjoying YouTube videos (or not) comes down to the personality of the presenter. That's why I'm going to refrain from commenting on Alec Steele's videos.

I won't mention the overly-enthusiastic schtick.

Honestly, I won't.

I'm a little disappointed that this isn't the video I was really looking for. I was looking for the video showing the testing of the various heat treatments of the steel.

I guess that's on part 2. Arrgghh...I guess that's next week then.

Heat Treatment -The Science of Forging (feat. Alec Steele)

There is something weird happening with the Real Engineering guy's accent. I'm struggling to place it exactly. There's a sing-song lilt to it that's screaming, "Irish" to me. Then, at 1:50, there's a weird ll-th thing going on with the 'through the heat treatment process' phrase that makes me think he's almost got Welsh in there. His patreon page says Galway, Ireland, but I've not heard that ll-th thing anywhere but from Wales.

Can anybody definitely say where he's from?

I'm going to have to check out the testing video from Alec Steele (an aptronym). Maybe that'll be next week's post.

So much great metallurgical explanation here...BCC, FCC, ferrite vs austenite vs pearlite, phase diagrams, quenching vs tempering vs annealing (normalising - British spelling, natch).

Aluminum recycling - How it works by Norsk Hydro

We have to recycle more.

There are many countries that are far, far better at recycling than is the US, but we (the US) have to get better.

I hadn't thought about the challenge of not just sorting the majority metals (steel from aluminum from copper from etc) but rather sorting the various similar metal alloys out from each other. The use of x-ray spectroscopy to do that is an application that I would never have considered, and the puff of air used to fire away the unacceptable aluminum alloy chips is amazingly fast.

It's amazing to me how technologically advanced the recycling industry is becoming.

Smart Materials of the Future - with Anna Ploszajski

"Rock-paper-scissors is a game that you use to compare materials' properties. The rock blunts the scissors because rock is harder than stainless steel."

C'mon, nerd, rock-paper-scissors is just a game like mumbledepeg or roshambo.

The simplicity of showing a smart material via pine cones is brilliant.

Oh, I found a definition of smart materials that I very much like (via BBC): "[s]mart materials have properties that react to changes in their environment. This means that one of their properties can be changed by an external condition, such as temperature, light, pressure or electricity. This change is reversible and can be repeated many times."

Other smart materials mentioned in the video are lime mortar from the Egyptian pyramids, piezoelectric quartz crystals, thermochromic pigments (on a mug), NiTiNOL, and ferrofluids. Most of the latter materials are applied to the future of airplane design.

Why graphene hasn't taken over the world...yet

As long as they don't make ropes of graphene and have a 200,000-person tug of war, I'm all good with most uses of graphene.

The idea of mixing graphene in with ink and printing circuits on fabric seems pretty outstanding to me. I love the image of clothing that could include its own circuitry and would be fully durable no matter how we treat it.

What is the NEW Silver Play Button REALLY made of?!

The video description doesn't remotely need that ?! at the end.

That being said, the process that the youtubers here go through to find out what specific elements are in the 'silver' play button is fascinating. The (?) Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometer is something that's new to me.

I'm particularly fascinated by the results at 5:39 showing the elemental makeup at various depths of the 'button.'

Yeah, all that's interesting, but what's the 'gold' play button award made of? And what's beyond the gold button?

Your old phone is a veritable gold mine

Honest question - how do I make sure my data is cleared from the electronics before I let them be recycled?

The most stunning fact in this video - recovering metals like gold from e-waste is now more efficient than digging it up from the Earth.

But it makes sense if the facts (1:40) are true. If a typical gold mine has 5-6 grams of gold per ton of Earth and a ton of mobile phones (typical e-waste) contains 350 grams, that's a brilliant source of gold.

Now we just have to find ways to get to the gold.

Notice the 'nothing you do to gold does anything to it (I'm paraphrasing, admittedly)' fact? That's because it's really low on the activity series. It's a noble metal.

Oh, and the fact that we haven't ratified the Basel Convention reminds us that the US is an awful global citizen. From wikipedia, "The 10 UN member states that are not party to the treaty are East Timor, Fiji, Grenada, Haiti, San Marino, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Tuvalu, United States, and Vanuatu."