EnginEarings

[revchris]

Years ago, I found a piece of aluminum that had spent years stuck in the sand near a melter in the foundry, which meant that it got warm and stayed that way for long periods of time. This caused the grains of aluminum in the piece to grow huge, to the point that they were actually faceting the surface.

I showed it to my boss, who promptly dropped it, denting one side of it, and we decided that it was way cool, and he said something about making jewelry out of it.

I went back to our foundry and dug through the scrap heap and found coiled sheets of high-purity aluminum, which we then proceeded to punch out, anneal for grain growth (which can be done in <1 hr), etch, anodize, and mount as jewelry. The first time we sold them was during the annual Engineering Expo, where we sold $1,000 of them. The project then mostly died, because it was work, so none of the students wanted to do anything about it, and I no longer had time for it.

The undergrads have just rediscovered them, and want to make some again for fundraising (they realized that, as a student org, they were broke and needed a fundraiser), so we'll see how it goes.