[TheForge] Forging Tungston?

[Andrew Vida]

peter fels & phoebe palmer wrote:
> *Bob;
> is that stuff too brittle to be used as a struck tool?

Tungsten is actually not brittle at all.  It is, in fact fairly soft. 
It machines pretty well with right tooling.  Tungsten is used to make 
penetrators for armor piercing projectiles.  Like uranium, it is dense, 
so when you pop a 15 to 20 pound, 1.75" diameter chunk of what they call 
"long rod" out the snoot of a gun at 5800 fps, you have incredible 
penetrating power due to the high sectional density, which is in part 
due to the high specific gravity of the material.  Hardness is not a 
requirement as everything liquefies on impact, penetrating and then 
showering the inhabitants of the hardened target with a cloud of molten 
metal and probably ionized gases.  It is claimed that one of the rocket 
assisted long rod projectiles strikes at about 30 THOUSAND fps.  At that 
point you probably have a plasma weapon in essence.