One of our most ambitious projects here at Trance Metals! A solid piece of Magnesium polished to an aerospace finish. It took us over a year to develop a method to machine this masterpiece!
We developed a CNC process that doesn't use water cooling and is much slower than traditional CNC cutting. The result is a perfect Magnesium sphere with a mirror finish.
This is the 4th polished sphere in our line-up:
Holding a piece of magnesium feels more like holding a block of wood. It has a density of only 1.74g/cc making it the least dense engineering metal. It's widely used to make extremely high strength-to-weight ratio alloys. Aluminum is 55% denser, steel 445%, and tungsten is a whopping 1103% denser!
At Trance, we like to say that you don’t truly own your metal piece, you merely borrow it until you can pass it down to the next generation.
This is what our Magnesium and Tungsten look like together. Unbelievably, they both weigh 1 kilogram!
Have you thought about what your legacy will be? Most of the plastic junk we buy at the store will rot away within our own lifetime. Trance Metal products are designed to outlast anything else you own. This museum-quality magnesium sphere will still be around thousands, perhaps millions of years from now.
This huge sphere of solid Magnesium will fool your brain!
If you’re like me, you find yourself drawn to solid, high-quality metal items. Hollow, plastic materials turn you off. You appreciate the quality that lasts. When you hand down this Museum Sphere to the next generation, you will impart that appreciation of quality to them.
You now share that connection with the future, and in some small way, you’ve changed the future of your family for the better.
Each sphere comes with an acrylic museum base and an O-ring for display.
Over the course of a year, we developed a CNC process to safely create this masterpiece. A large cylinder of Magnesium is put onto a metal lathe and carefully worked using a CNC, then hand polished in an hours-long process. We can't use water in our cooling process, and we have to use special bits at a very low speed.
Here are some videos and pictures of the process:
The resulting raw sphere after our unique CNC process.
After many hours of polishing.
We are including our Museum base FREE with any KILO series pledge!
Hi, I’m Rudy Marsh, founder of Trance Metals. Since our first copper sphere project in 2016 raised over $500,000, we've been creating the highest-quality metal pieces in the world. Our trademark is the aerospace-grade polished metal spheres, which we release every few years after we've refined the process of making them.
I was what you might call a below-average student in high school, but I can remember one pivotal moment. It was one of those moments that you don’t realize the importance of until years later.
My physics teacher passed around an earring made from titanium for us each to handle briefly. It was my first experience actually holding this mythical metal. My brain had a hard time processing the thin, spiral design that was as strong as steel but felt as light as plastic. It didn’t feel real.
From that point on, I was in love with the sciences and ended up with a physics degree a few years later from the University of Texas at Dallas. Inspired by the birth of my son, I started Esington and Trance Metals to reconnect with my love for pure metal. This solid kilogram Magnesium sphere would have totally blown my mind since it's less than half the density of titanium!