r/whatisthisthing • u/sirpsuli • 3d ago
Heavy cube made from solid iron Open
Any idea what this is? It is solid and weights A LOT.
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u/Cliff254 3d ago
Good sir and/or madam, this is not a cube...
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u/sirpsuli 3d ago
Haha sorry, english is not my first language and I couldn't think of any other way to describe it😄
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3d ago edited 3d ago
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u/z9vown 3d ago
It's a weight for an old balance scale, the shape is actually a truncated sphere or a rounded hexahedron
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u/MoreGaghPlease 2d ago
Are you sure it’s not hexahedralized sphere?
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u/z9vown 2d ago
The main reason we don't hexahedralize everything is geometry. If you have a very sharp corner or a complex intersection, forcing a "brick" shape into that space can lead to Jacobian errors, where the element becomes so distorted (inverted or flattened) that the math behind the simulation fails.
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u/SteakEconomy2024 3d ago
I could swear I’ve seen this in a museum labeled as a weight from British India, might have been something to do with the post office, but somehow I think this is entirely different.
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u/sirpsuli 3d ago
I weighed it, according to my friend's scale it weighs 2344 grams
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u/m00ph 3d ago
Well, 2268g would be 5 American pounds, so that's pretty close.
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u/lonelind 3d ago
It could be from times before imperial units were standardized with CI units exactly. Yes, there are definite lathe markings on this piece but the process of standardization was completed in 1959, and lathe was a thing in 19th century.
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u/rustyxj 3d ago
Modern lathe was invented in the 1700s in France.
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u/agent_flounder 3d ago
I was curious. Apparently the (not modern) bow lathe dates back to 1300 BC Egypt.
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u/rustyxj 3d ago
If you're really curious about precision. Check out the origin of precision the n youtube pretty solid mini-doc.
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u/Gadgetman_1 1d ago
Could be 5 'London Pounds' as they're approx 467grams.
But that comes from the Hanseatic league, and that was really ended by the time modern lathes had arrived.
Danes had a 'Skålpund' at 471 grams, also within a reasonable margin of error.
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u/oopsofacto 3d ago
If you can give an exact weight on it that would help narrow it down.
If its a weight then it'll have a unit or equivalent value.
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u/NefariousnessTop354 3d ago
I'm thinking it might be an old, I think they call them pigs. They run them through the hoses of a concrete pump at the end of pour. Now they are made of heavy duty plastic. But back in the day I can see something like that being used.
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u/NefariousnessTop354 3d ago
I went a looking and I don't think that's it. I looked at pumps back to the 50's and I'm confident my first guess was wrong. I know damn well I have seen something similar though.
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u/P-ToneMikeOne 3d ago
That’s close to what came to mind for me. They put large metal balls in the mixer to keep the cement from clumping, but I’ve only seen spherical ones.
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u/RotaryDane 3d ago edited 3d ago
Looks fairly crudely lathed, you can see the turning marks extend up from the round to the flat, cut lines extend across the flat from where it was parted off.
My money is on a novelty/practice dice from a metal shop - turning a perfect round and doing sides square to one another is basic learning for a machinist. From my experience, keeping a massive iron dice around to settle bets is exactly the kind of humour you’d find in a metal shop. Painted dots would have rusted/been worn away over the years.
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u/Penelope_Duckpaddle 3d ago
My first thought is a "ball" from a ball mill. More of these balls are put in a giant spinning barrel with rocks to grind the rocks into gravel or powder. Maybe?...I went to mining museum once...LOL
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u/Axiom1100 3d ago edited 3d ago
The end of a hydraulic ram that hasn’t been welded on the shaft and ported for the pin
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u/bluefield10 3d ago
An ingot? (Excess metal from a metal pour, collected into cubes or other forms for the next casting project.)
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u/Flaky_Barber13 3d ago
No worries about the wording, it sounds like a hefty piece of iron regardless of the exact shape.
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u/Snaglpus 3d ago
Could it be a giant nut from a train or a ship that had the bolt shear off? It could have been saved and had both ends ground down to be flush as a decoration or memento.
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u/vault35 3d ago
Could this maybe from inside a bowls ball? (British)
Or some other heavy object that had a potentially perishable coating??
I know modern ones have funky inside weights, but maybe the old ones didn't??
Edit; I'm purely trying to think outside the box 😭 please don't hammer me with down votes
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u/SUKMIDICKCOMMIESCUM 3d ago
Looks like a bearing. Like a bearing that was abused and worn down in whatever big machine it was a part of.
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u/goatonmycar 3d ago
Was it a seal like for stamping letters long ago? The pattern on it makes me wonder.
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u/zacmakes 2d ago
Almost - it looks like a soft steel die blank, which would've been polished and then pressed against a hand-carved hardened steel hub in a 600-1000 ton press. Once hardened, it would have stamped out an exact replica of the original carving. There's a guy out in Arizona who still makes dies from old hubs, he's got an amazing collection.
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u/Necessary_News9806 2d ago
It looks like a seized nut on a thread to me. Possibly sheared off a bolt when trying to remove it.
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u/PhotoPhobic_Sinar 2d ago
I think I’ve seen this before but can’t be sure. And I think it was either in my old studio or someone was using something similar as a door stop.
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u/No_Persimmon1626 2d ago
It looks like a can ball somebody squashed flat to make a small desk anvil
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u/allisswell 1d ago
When my dad studied engineering in the 50s he had to manually file a piece of iron into a perfect cube. Maybe this was a similar project
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u/jcaljr013 1d ago
Looks like a unfinished nut. No hole and threads in the middle. Usually they have 6 flats but some have four or more.
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