I have made an acquisition today from a local company.
- Gorton Mastermil milling machine
- One pallet of welding rod
- Three Troyke rotary tables 21 inch or so.
On the pallet of welding rod, there is an opened 50 pound container without marking. It is clear to me that this is nickel rod, because of a typical dark color.
The rod is magnetic.
My question is, what kind of home test can I perform to see if this is
55 nickel or 99 nickel.
I think that it is 55 nickel, personally. (like "nomacast")
There are differences in ductility and hardness owing to the differing compositions but I doubt there's any way w/o an actual test rig to determine the one over another at least w/o known samples for comparison, not just a given single unknown sample.
If one were _extremely_ familiar w/ the two, one could probably tell by burning one from the characteristics, but that person would not be me... :)
Nickel's specific gravity is about 10% great than iron's; enough so it'd be relatively easy to tell the difference between 99% Ni and a
55/45 alloy of Ni/Fe. But, copper's SG is very close to nickel, so I think Monel (cupro-nickel) rod would be hard to dstiguish from 99% Ni by SG alone. Weathered Monel can also have a grayish surface.
If that were all that were in a typical rod, undoubtedly so.
Being so hot today I've given outside work up for a while, I looked at a couple datasheets typical composition numbers and calculated a rod density for the two...
+.025*8.96)/16.5 D99 = 8.5583 >> C99=0.85+14.5*(0.08+0.02+0.025+0.02+0.025)/16.5 % Ni Fe C Si Cu C99 = 0.9994 >> D55/D99 ans = 0.9721 >>
The ratio of the two is within 3% owing to the Cu+Mn primarily in the 99 bringing up the weight more than their "fair share" in comparison. The datasheet was min/max (Ni/others) so the 14.5/16.5 factor is to bring the total composition fraction to roughly unity; otherwise the percentages sum to >102%.
The "C" values are sanity checks on the percentages...
So, undoubtedly could tell if had two to compare side-by-side, still a little tougher to decide if the difference one is seeing is the rod difference or a possible variation in composition between vendors...
I hadn't tried to compute before but thought it might work out even closer overall before than this estimate so didn't suggest weight/density as a reliable distinguisher, either.
Seconded - One of those little X-ray Backscatter gun analyzers would tell you what you have in seconds. And would let the scrap man tell you what it's worth to him, too.
Though it would help a lot to have known samples of both types of Nickel rod in your hands for comparison, even with one known sample you can go "I don't know what it is, but now I know what it isn't..."
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