Talk:Babbitt (alloy)

Name change

I'd like to change the name of this article to Babbitt (metal), because most sources refer to the metal as "Babbitt" and not "Babbitt metal". One source is the Machinery's Handbook. Wizard191 (talk) 17:06, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Information

75% lead and 10% tin do not add up to 100%. I recommend removing this bulletpoint until the actual composition can be found. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Promptx (talk • contribs) 15:06, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Original Composition

The article states "Isaac Babbitt's exact formulation is not known with certainty", with a nebulous reference given, but in Isaac Babbitt's US Patent No. 1252 , he states the use of a composition made up of tin, antimony, and copper, at a ratio of 50:5:1, respectively. Kacela (talk) 12:52, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Interesting. I swear I have read in a 20th-century book that his exact composition is now unknown. But that patent tells exactly what one of his compositions was, and makes clear that he expected to use others, too (probably already had). The one thing I would add, however, before saying that "that book was undoubtedly wrong", would be to consider the context of a patent: although a patent involves revealing a good idea to the world, he probably had some further degree of trade secret up his sleeve (secret sauce, as they say) that he was being coy about in this patent. What I hear him saying between the lines is, "I'm telling you suckers an example of a good recipe, but don't kid yourselves that it's my only recipe or my best recipe." If others tried this published recipe and found that it didn't work as well as the bearings that Babbitt sold later, then he was using some other undisclosed formula, and they maybe had no way of analyzing it definitively. However, I must say that with all the gee-whiz mass spectrometry and chromatography advancements in recent decades, I wonder if nowadays they could determine it if given a good specimen. Which would change the "now unknown", even if it was true 40 years ago. — ¾-10 22:45, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

References

Additional information about use in art and decorative objects needed

It would be a great help if someone who knows a great deal more than I do about either metallurgy, antiques, or both would add some additional information about the use of this in making cheap trinket boxes, decorative sculptures, etc. for the masses. There are a host of small jewelry boxes made of this on Ebay, and it was in researching one of these that I ended up on this page -- on Ebay.fr the metal these are made of is consistently called "régule cuivré" but the only information I have been able to track down about it is on the French Wikipedia version of this page and it is unsourced. However if you request "Français" under languages on this page and let Google Chrome try to translate the page, you get a fairly understandable translation into English, along with a good image, and if you search "régule cuivré" you get a number of images. French Wikipedia simply titles this page "Régule" -- my suspicion is that régule refers to all Babbitt metal and that the cuivré describes a piece being made of either copper or brass alloy. Régule may mean simply mold or some related term in this context though and cuivré may describe the alloy of the Babbitt metal or may refer to the brass coating it was covered with. Someone whose French is far better than mine will have to sort this out, but considering the large number of objects made of this outside the industrial sphere, and that Wikipedia has become the first stop go-to source for non-experts to start researching a topic, it seems that it would be helpful for the article to make some mention of this non-industrial use. Cardweaver (talk) 06:08, 25 September 2014 (UTC)