What can you do with tungsten wire?

[jrkorman]

So I bought a box of "stuff" and one item was a roll of 0.005" tungsten wire. There's about 40 feet of the stuff and aside from making my own filaments I'm not really sure what to do with it.

 

[whitmore]

I'd suggest homebrew EDM; copper, graphite, and tungsten all make good durable cutters
for spark machining. Tungsten that thin, though; maybe a cheese-knife style cutter rather
than a stiff-wire plunge tool?

 

[mmcmdl]

Hang bird hoses ?

 

[Ulma Doctor]

Hot wire foam cutter

 

[RJSakowski]

I'd suggest homebrew EDM; copper, graphite, and tungsten all make good durable cutters
for spark machining. Tungsten that thin, though; maybe a cheese-knife style cutter rather
than a stiff-wire plunge tool?

Wire EDM's do not plunge cut. The wire is on two spools, much like a tape recorder. The wire is fed past the work to make the cut. It is only used once as the process erodes the wire so it is unsuitable for a second pass. IIRC, .010" is about as small a wire that can be used although my experience goes back a decade.

An interesting side bar is that my colleague designed and built an EDM lathe where the wire was passed by the rotating part. It was used to make injection molding die parts with features that would be difficult to make using conventional cutting methods. I recall the .010" wure dimension because it was the smallest fillet that we could make with the process.

 

[RJSakowski]

Hot wire foam cutter

I made one using wire feed wire and it worked well. The biggest problem I had was when I applied enough tension to keep the wire taught, the wire would break if the wire got too hot. Tungsten should work better in that regard.

 

[Reddinr]

Make a giant light bulb.

 

[Damn Yankee]

Garrot.

 

[homebrewed]

Our lab used to have scanning electron microscopes that used a tungsten hairpin as the electron source. IIRC the tungsten wire was about the same diameter as what you've got.

The fellow that operated the SEMs made his own hairpins by spot welding the shaped wire down to a holder. Yet another dyed in the wool homebrewer.

Other than that, you might be able to use it to clean out (very) small diameter orfices. Or perhaps use EDM to make very small orfices. Optical pinholes? Pinhole camera, anyone?

 

[MikeWi]

No one has mentioned a cheese cutter yet!