3 ms·

With an aluminum rather than magnesium or other body, how bad do you anticipate the flex will be?

hinkley 6y ago
Reinforcing fins can do quite a bit. Macbooks don't have a lot of flex. However, Apple has some patents that cover building up solid aluminum with stir welding instead of CNCing out of a solid block. You might have to challenge that patent (prior art, Boeing patents that may be older) to make it cheap, but if it's enthusiast targeted, an extra 50 bucks or whatever might be just fine for people.
- baybal2 6y ago
  You cannot weld aluminium, or at least not on the cheap. The only real "weldable aluminium" known today are scandium-aluminium alloys which are both hard to get, and expensive.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Cannondale bicycles would like to have a word with you. They started out making bikes out of 'aircraft aluminum' which if memory serves was [6061](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6061_aluminium_alloy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6061_aluminium_alloy), which is magnesium silicon, not scandium. Do you mean you can't weld aluminum in an oxygen environment? I think you're right about that at least. I think they used argon, and then had a patented(?) annealing process to keep it from falling apart under the customers. Not sure what they do now. You have probably flown in an airplane with stir-welded aluminum. Stir welding is a bit like... making velcro and sticking it together at exactly the same time. Nobody is building things out of 'aluminum' so it feels like nitpicking to argue about metalurgy for a company that is just going to buy stock in block or plate form. With a bunch of electronics nerds. I only brought the metal in to talk about stiffening and because some patents may make it difficult for them to build a work-alike that lives up to their hype.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      There are somewhat weldable alumium alloys, but their joints are still nowhere near as strong as steel ones in relative comparison. And you still have very painstaking process of finding the optimal welding recipe for the part, post-treatment, and defectoscopy.

Reinforcing fins can do quite a bit. Macbooks don't have a lot of flex. However, Apple has some patents that cover building up solid aluminum with stir welding instead of CNCing out of a solid block. You might have to challenge that patent (prior art, Boeing patents that may be older) to make it cheap, but if it's enthusiast targeted, an extra 50 bucks or whatever might be just fine for people.

baybal2 6y ago
You cannot weld aluminium, or at least not on the cheap. The only real "weldable aluminium" known today are scandium-aluminium alloys which are both hard to get, and expensive.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Cannondale bicycles would like to have a word with you. They started out making bikes out of 'aircraft aluminum' which if memory serves was [6061](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6061_aluminium_alloy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6061_aluminium_alloy), which is magnesium silicon, not scandium. Do you mean you can't weld aluminum in an oxygen environment? I think you're right about that at least. I think they used argon, and then had a patented(?) annealing process to keep it from falling apart under the customers. Not sure what they do now. You have probably flown in an airplane with stir-welded aluminum. Stir welding is a bit like... making velcro and sticking it together at exactly the same time. Nobody is building things out of 'aluminum' so it feels like nitpicking to argue about metalurgy for a company that is just going to buy stock in block or plate form. With a bunch of electronics nerds. I only brought the metal in to talk about stiffening and because some patents may make it difficult for them to build a work-alike that lives up to their hype.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    There are somewhat weldable alumium alloys, but their joints are still nowhere near as strong as steel ones in relative comparison. And you still have very painstaking process of finding the optimal welding recipe for the part, post-treatment, and defectoscopy.