Best Bang For The Buck Fasteners

May be the sound of circulation in a partially occluded carotid?

 

Thread cut vs. Thread rolled silicon bronze screws

No doubt silicon bronze screws are the best, especially in the salt water. But becareful, there are two types of silicon bronze screws. One's thread formed by rolling, which makes the shank thinner than the threads. The other's thread formed by cutting. That is, the threads are formed by removing material from the shank and the shank has the same diameter as the thread. Therefor, the thread cutting bronze screws are stronger, better water proof, and harder to break when install. I believe www.j2depot.com has best price as I know of.

 

....silicon bronze screws are very good, but not unfortunately the best commercial marine alternative, the winner there is monel......just so you know just in case someone asks one day.

 

Where can a person get those?

 

Personally I don't trust screwing even at a party. Screws are fine for holding stuff in the place while the epoxy hardens and should then be removed and tossed IMHO. If I am using chine logs instead of glass tape I will reinforce the seams with screws to prevent crack propagation, but I make sure the screw heads are visible so I can keep an eye on 'em.

 

ok I got some time and I have friends who are junkers so here's the plan
Im going to start collecting copper, tin, silicon ( which I must admit is a mystery metal to me I always thought it was a glue although maybe this is in reference to the mineral )

according to the info I have bronze is made up of 88% coper and 12% tin
silicon bronze is an additive of 2~3% silicon
neither have all that high a melting temp and this bronze stuff should be pretty easy to brew up given that I already have all the stuff to do it anyway
next trick will be figuring out how to add silicon to the mix and when in the process I add it

should be kinda fun and its likely the cheapest way to silicon bronze bolts I'm going to find

I can pour them myself and then cut in the threads over at my buddies machine shop

should end up with a box of silicon bronze bolts for the cost of scrap copper

what I need is the right recipe for silicon bronze

 

Virtually all transistors and most other semiconductors (but not LED's) are made of almost pure silicon. Good luck with your foundry!

 

now thats a thought
anything large and industrial made of the stuff that I might salvage somewhere

my bet is all the toxic coatings on most electronics are going to prohibit me from recycling this material from old circuit boards

 

The silicon chips are inside plastic moldings which will probably fracture fairly easily or just melt off. There'll be a bunch of plated copper "legs" and a small chunk of silicon, unless things have changed a lot from when I was active in the business. There are "old-fashioned" ones that look like insects with the legs soldered into holes in the printed circuit board and more modern ones that are soldered on top of the PCB: not sure which would be easiest.

The Si chip will be small but it will be about as pure as you could desire, the other elements to make it a usable semiconductor are added in very low concentrations, practically atom by atom, and you don't need much for Si bronze.

It is likely to be easier than trying to extract Si from compounds like glass or sand. Worth a try I think!

With all the junk electronics around it may be possible to get it from a recycler. I think they mostly want the copper, gold and other high value stuff, not sure if the Si chips get recycled or end up in a land fill: they are pretty inert.

A thought on safety: if you are going to be burning plastics and melting lead you will need damn good ventilation, better still a fume chamber. Also handle items likely to contain high concentrations of Beryllium with care: it is used in capacitors and the insulating wafers under high power transistors used to be made of Be oxide. High power transistors and the larger computer chips tend to have the most Si, soldered to a metal tab, but recyclers will mine them for the copper.

 

Where can a person get those?

 

there are a couple of lunatics that live in the back alley in a bus, we don't make much of it cause they are not loud or drunk and seem to keep the rest of the bums out
they recycle everything they can get there hands on including electronics and copper
I might have to buy the tin but I can collect all the coper and silicon I could ever want for a small fee

 

Boston, if you make silicon bronze bolts in your way, I would worry about your boat day and night.
First, the marine grade silicon bronze 651 has minimum 96% of copper not 88%. Second, your bolts will be significantly weaker than regular bolts. Read some books about making fasteners before you take any serious action.

www.j2depot.com

 

well as I said I need the recipe but I have a forge and all the stuff
just procured copper at $3/lb and can get all the silicone chips I'd ever need
( spoke to my friends the alley people )

seems that a bit of experimentation later and I will know if I can do this or not

if you have a recipe I'd love to know what it is

marine grade silicon bronze alloy percentages is specifically what I need

found it

Cu 98.5
Fe Max 0.8
Mn Max 0.7
Pb Max 0.05
Si 0.8 - 2
Zn Max 1.5

 

Yak

is it a not so small black rectangular wafer with a bunch of little copper legs sticking out of it

memory chip looking thing cause the alley people have a whole box of them if its what I'm thinking of

 

Sounds like the beast. They come in all sizes with any number of leads from 14 up to who knows what. There's pics at Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit