What are the materials with similar, but lower, densities? WC, I guess, at 15.63 g/cc; what else?
Apparently wholesale tungsten costs US$30/kg, which is about one fourth the US$130 cost the guy paid. I'd think either wire EDM or wire ECM would be able to dice tungsten into featureless cubes for a lot less than US$100/kg. Its brittleness wouldn't be a problem.
Also, it could very easily be impure, or even not tungsten at all; lots of people have gotten tricked into buying tungsten-carbide jewelry they thought was tungsten, and tungsten carbide isn't even metal. The Amazon seller says it's actually 5% nickel and iron, though I'm not clear whether it's an alloy or a powder-metallurgy sinter using those metals as sintering aids. Alloys aren't necessarily less dense than their densest pure component, so impurities might not even lower the density. X-ray fluorescence would be a cheap way to detect heavy-metal impurities (though not, say, boron, carbon, or nitrogen).
The guy is excited about how it's durable and will last for a long time. I think he will be disappointed if it really is so brittle that he chips the corner off by dropping it on the floor. Probably the nickel and iron will prevent that.
Apparently wholesale tungsten costs US$30/kg, which is about one fourth the US$130 cost the guy paid. I'd think either wire EDM or wire ECM would be able to dice tungsten into featureless cubes for a lot less than US$100/kg. Its brittleness wouldn't be a problem.
Also, it could very easily be impure, or even not tungsten at all; lots of people have gotten tricked into buying tungsten-carbide jewelry they thought was tungsten, and tungsten carbide isn't even metal. The Amazon seller says it's actually 5% nickel and iron, though I'm not clear whether it's an alloy or a powder-metallurgy sinter using those metals as sintering aids. Alloys aren't necessarily less dense than their densest pure component, so impurities might not even lower the density. X-ray fluorescence would be a cheap way to detect heavy-metal impurities (though not, say, boron, carbon, or nitrogen).
The guy is excited about how it's durable and will last for a long time. I think he will be disappointed if it really is so brittle that he chips the corner off by dropping it on the floor. Probably the nickel and iron will prevent that.