Let’s say that cube is 4.5’ a side. That’s 91.125 cu ft. Tungsten weighs 1,201.738 lb/cu ft. Which means the cube weighs 109,508.38 lb.
That’s an impressively sturdy floor.
Currently, tungsten is selling at about $340 USD/ton.
The block weighs 54.7542 tons.
So this is indeed a decent prize at $18,616 USD.
All you have to do to claim your prize is get it home.
Edit: corrected to a less whelming but still difficult to transport prize thanks to chiliedogg.
You divided by 2 instead of 2000 on your pounds/tons conversion.
Good thing I’m not an accountant
Well this isn’t some mundane detail, Michael!
My immediate response was to do the same calc. But using SI units, because I don’t live in Myanmar or the USA.
I figure that it’s a cube, and judging by the size of the lucky winner, I would guess that the sides are 1.5m. 3.375m^3 at 19.254 g/cm^3 is roughly 65 tons. According to https://www.metal.com/Tungsten/202212260004 tungsten bars are trading for 49USD/kg. IDK where you got 340 USD/ton, but we seem to differ.
65 tons at 49 USD/kg is 3’185’000 USD.
I’d say that a solid homogeneous of tungsten should probably fetch a fair bit more than my price. Casting a cube like that is not going to be easy. Tungsten is rather reactive in the molten form, and has to be kept from air. Just alone keeping 65 tons of molten tungsten under a protective layer of inergen gas is going to be challenging.
2/10 Prize 8/10 Prize if delivery is included
I can put it in the front yard, spray paint it gold, and start a neighborhood cult around The Cube.
You ain’t putting it anywhere. It’s getting delivered and staying where they put it.
A single 5 foot cube of tungsten would weigh about as much as an above average sized single family home.
I assume dumped on the yard would be the only delivery option.
Lol it looks even a decent forklift maxes out at 70k lbs
That cube would be in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars of tungsten
That is… surprisingly little. Are you sure?
I mean, I can only estimate it’s size from the person standing next to it. From there I can use that estimate to get the volume of the cube, then the weight, then look up the cost by weight right now and apply the average.
So it would be somewhere around 1mm by weight.
I’m betting I got it a few months before someone can gather the equipment to steal it. It would have outlived its novelty and likely be a burden at that point. If the cult works out The Cube should be self sufficient and could even become a profitable local attraction.
A tungsten cube that size would weigh a fuckload.
To just deliver it would be an undertaking. There will be roads between you and the where ever this came from that are not rated for that weight.
You may need a specialized truck just to move it, and a crane to get it on and off said truck…
Just get egyptians to move it
If they won’t deliver The Cube at their expense, they should have given out a more reasonable prize.
It’s a challenge prize.
“Oh you think you won The Cube? Then come and get it”.Then three months later a new person wins The Cube.
How does one join the cult for The Cube?
One must simply gaze upon the glory of The Cube. The Cube will invite you in, keep you warm, keep you safe. The Cube welcomes all. The Cube just wants to share.
Cube!
Cube is life.
Assuming that’s a meter cubed it weighs 19 tons, or 65 tons for 1.5m³
I’m seeing $30,000 per ton there (as of 2018) so wouldn’t the cubic meter cost about $645,000?
They misplaced the comma or used a weird system distinct from the Western or Indian one
Holy shit Tom is rich now! If he can move it though.
How did they put it on the stage?
Spawned it in with a console command.
They built the stage around the cube.
I unironically want this
Me too. It’s worth over $1 million.
But the guy above said fif… You know what, I’ll give you $1 million.
To be fair, these estimates here are just guessing the actual size and composition of that cube. Still, that’s a lot of tungsten.
Assuming that’s about 5x5’, and going by the price of the first tungsten cube found on Google, this would be worth about 15 million dollars. Decent prize of you could move 150,000lb.
Going with your 5’ x 5’ x 5’ size, that should weigh about 132,624 pounds, or about 66.3 tons. The price, as of 2018, was about $30,000/ton. That works out to be about $2M.
Still a pretty heft prize.
Didn’t calculate the price by weight. Just took the number from the 6" cube here and extrapolated from that since it was the easiest math.
https://shop.tungsten.com/tungsten-cube/
The 5’ cube is 1000 times the size of the 6" cube and the 6" cube is $15k. The prices don’t scale up linearly though. The smaller cubes are better value by weight.
I’ll make my own cubes! Will a sawsall get through that motherfucker?
Of course! It’s “saws all” not “can’t saw tungsten”!
It’s about letting go…
this would be worth about 15 million dollars
But where and to whom?
Unless there is some clause talking about time to receive or “only the participant”, then I would sell this thing at a fraction of the price and frolic into the sunset. Let someone else deal with the logistics, I just made an easy Mil.
Hmmm.
So the real game show is getting value out of the prize.
Welcome to another exciting episode of CAN! YOU! FENCE THIS?!?!*
Alright contestants, this week your prize is: 600 tons of wood chips! Whoever earns the most money selling your prize will be our lucky winner and move on to round 2.
Reminds me of an impromptu back and forth prank a set of brothers used to pull on each other where they regifted each other a pair of hideous moleskin pants in increasingly elaborate ways.
I’d watch the fuck out of that.
I think I’m going to pitch it to the History channel. Maybe see if I can get Jason Murphy on board.
“Welcome to Can You Fence This, the game show about finding buyers for valuable yet burdensome objects. Ordinary contestants will compete to unload their consignments for the most money without destroying public infrastructure.”
Shoot it in Nevada, lots of establishing shots of the cast standing with their arms folded in very orange light.
Best I can do is a copy of Battletoads
About the same as me winning a giant-ass dinette and patio set for my moderate-sized apartment.
Typically people take the cash value on prizes like that. Because not inly do you have to figure out what to do with what you won, you also have to pay taxes on the value of it.
Melt it.
Wait…
I’d want to put this in front of the house. No one would steel it ever. lol
Of course not. It’s tungsten. Not steel.
Sounds like a Peter Molyneux game. “And if you click on the cube, you might win another cube”
It’s being teleported to your location as we speak. I hope you don’t mind it would redesign a couple of floors below you.
I like how there’s so many comments about the value of the cube, and no two comments have the same value.
I mean if you get it in bulk it might be cheaper… but at the same time that would probably be really hard to make and take a major portion of the tungsten supply to make.
Please deliver this to my moon base
NCD would probably be delighted to have something that can be turned into multiple rods from god
You know those degens would also use those rods as a sex toy.
I really wanted to use Tungsten as the base ballast for a custom narrowboat, for better headroom. Other than the cost you also have the problem of tungsten’s melting point being so high you can’t pour it into a boat hull without melting through.
Aircraft use tungsten ballast plates. I know it requires hardware, but would that have been viable?
Possible but the expense ruined my plans in the end… I did consider collecting broken tungsten end mills and inserts from machine shops and throwing them in molten lead, like croutons in a lead soup.
If I understand it right, you’d get mostly cobalt that way. Carbide tooling isn’t solid tungsten or silicon carbide but carbide powder embedded in cobalt.
You also can’t melt it in general outside of some high tech magnetic field induction chambers, as doing so would melt the furnace in most cases.
Almost all industrial applications of tungsten involve electrochemistry or otherwise the mixing of fine tungsten dust.
Throw it in the water! I want to se what happens!
It sinks.
Tungsten isn’t reactive with water, it’s not an alkali metal.
Sodium, lithium, potassium etc (alkali metals) would react violently with water though.
A frankium cube that big would be neat. Only downside is, that half of it is decayed after like 7 Minutes(if I remember correctly)
I was remembering it wrong. Oops. In chemistry class, we had a professor who put a cube of some material into water and it skidded along the surface making very angry noises. Can’t remember which element that was.
Catmium
Probably Potassium
K
Good luck retrieving your giant tungsten payday from the murky depths now.
