For me plastic is better than "aerospace aluminum"

[Sustacel250]

In the consumer market theres a ton of products labeled "aerospace aluminum". Especially from america.

These consumer products are also expensive and they are mostly designer items. The first who introduced in normie masses the idea that aluminum is a "noble" material is of course apple. They had the iphones with the aluminum chassis. And a ton of media marketers for a period of 5 years repeated the word "noble" associating it with "aluminum". Online reviews all praising the "noble" aluminum.

What I found instead is aluminum is not great. It is easy to machine but its very soft and takes scratches easily. Aluminum breaks easily. If you make a screw in aluminum, the screw galls easily and threads cannot be small because they smear. This is not different with "aerospace aluminum" which is basically the same. Every single time you tighten a thread too much, it will remove some materal so is inevitable you break the product.

Aluminum has low hardness, which is OK so you can use CNC like they do in china for the iphone chassis. But the same low hardness meas any aluminum product takes scratches if you put it into the pocket. Which is great I suppose if you sell iphone covers so you train normies to think they have to "protect" the "nobility" of their aluminum precious iphones. Normies are also trained like dogs with a simple association: costs more = is worth more. Obviously this is just NLP.

Another issue is coating. "aerospace aluminum" often has a type of coating that wears off super fast and has various colors. And when the coating wears off it is also super ugly to see. The coating makes aluminum very slippery like a piece of soap. Its not very tactile and you will not like the feel of the object.

Which is the reason chinese people now do stuff in titanium. Chinese people hate aluminum as well as I do, and they do all with 304, titanium or 420 or "anything but not aluminum". Aluminum "designer items" come mostly from the USA because apparently their CNC industry is outdated.

In my case I really prefer to have these "premium plastics" like delrin or torlon or the polycarbonate for construction. But even the plain old ABS plastic is fine for me all I have to do is be aware it will degrade fast if I expose it to UV direct sunlight but for the rest is a fine material. Screws made in plastic bend and deform they have some rubbery properties so they dont break or chip like aluminum does. Nylon screws are also decent. Polyester plastic has alot of usecases as well.

So in a nutshell maybe aluminum does have a place in "aerospace" applications no idea which one tey are but in consumer products I would say is best to avoid it and instead use better steel or just plain old plastics or these newer "bioresin" will do fine. So yeah I dont use aluminum, I rather go with g10 or carbon fiber I get from china.

[Pour_Lui]

They use it to make cans, how is it noble? xD

[Sustacel250]

They use it to make cans, how is it noble? xD

Well, on a phone you can say the aluminum makes it more rigid. But transfers heat less efficiently. A normie friend of mine was used to say aluminum is the cooling method of apple, because it gets hot and that was their "secret strategy". But not really, it was more like a problem that apple never truly fixed.

I had a powermac g4 and the heat was deforming and bending the buttons so I had to put it in a fridge when I installed linux. It was a problem never truly fixed until apple just started using ARM with their new M1-2-3... So aluminum didnt really do much at all for cooling. It was a problem and normies just accepted it.

But maybe there was a bit of truth in the idea because in the past iphone 4 the aluminum was spreading heat laterally. So maybe that was a good excuse to have it. No idea. The thing is in the normie mind this translated into "if it gets so hot all of a sudden when I scroll the gallery app then it must be working apple is right". Well thats an illusion. Just like is an illusion to think aluminum is "noble".

On a phone I would say plastics is fine. Depends, some of the recent nokia plastics are really junk. But just plain old ABS will do fine. Plastics isnt bad. I would have understood if they sold an iphone premium price but it has silver and gold decorations or if it was made of some really cool titanium. But aluminum? why aluminum? If it was made of a normal stainless steel that would have been better.

[Pour_Lui]

A bit offtopic, but I much prefer plastic mechanical pencils over metal ones.

[Pour_Lui]

A bit offtopic, but I much prefer plastic mechanical pencils over metal ones.

Metal mechanical pencils weight more and are unbalanced, they also tend to have more parts where they can fail. The Pentel p20x design has almost nowhere to break, mechanical pencils are solved engineering.

[Sustacel250]

A bit offtopic, but I much prefer plastic mechanical pencils over metal ones.

Yeah I have the old rotring model tikky which is in plastic wavy grip. the grip is inferior to the new one made of aluminum but is pretty robust and lasted 1 generation already (my dad bought tons it was popular in engineering). The newer one in aluminum has the better grip tho. Its one of these situation where aluminum has a place in consumer products. However lots of people prefer the gel rubbery grip, i dont but some do.

[Pour_Lui]

A bit offtopic, but I much prefer plastic mechanical pencils over metal ones.

Yeah I have the old rotring model tikky which is in plastic wavy grip. the grip is inferior to the new one made of aluminum but is pretty robust and lasted 1 generation already (my dad bought tons it was popular in engineering). The newer one in aluminum has the better grip tho. Its one of these situation where aluminum has a place in consumer products. However lots of people prefer the gel rubbery grip, i dont but some do.

I don't like gel, rubber or anything like that, I prefer if products are solid and have few parts. My mouse is a Logitech m100 which is super simple with 3 buttons and solid, I use a metal chair to sit, Tolix style. I always chase for those products with fewer points of failure, and the good thing is they tend to be cheap as well.