Tin

Tin is a non-ferrous material and it’s mostly silvery. Its main proprieties are its malleability and ductility. It’s soft, resistant to corrosion but with a low resistance to efforts. Its main applications are two: steel laminates covering (can, tin) and soldering. Tin has also different alloys: bronze (with copper), soldering (lead), with bismuth and antimony, and it’s used mostly for electrical fuse blew and antifriction materials. As tin has a really low fusion temperature it’s easy to malleable and so make pieces in difficult shapes.

Lead

Lead is a non-ferrous material and it’s the densest one, and because of this lead is used for protection for noises, X-rays and gamma rays. Its melting temperature is so low that it’s easy to mould in complicated shapes like little pieces of chess, bullets. It has another important propriety: lead doesn’t tend to corrode with air, water and acids, what makes it useful for fountains and antioxidant paints. Lead is a very useful metal but it has a problem: it is toxic and pollutant. In the past lead was used for pipes but when it was known that it was toxic, industries started to make them of plastic. If we ingest lead, even an extremely small and tiny particle, it’s toxic for us and we can’t expel it from our body. So we have to be very careful with it.

Copper

Copper is a non-ferrous material and it’s one of the few that is found on its own in nature. Its main characteristics are that it’s soft, ductile and malleable. It’s easy to work with when it’s cold but it has acrimony, hardness, resistance and fragility. It has a really high level of thermal and electrical conductivity. It’s very resistant to corrosion and easy to recycle. You can make alloys with copper like bronze (copper and tin), which increases mechanical properties and it’s less conductive and it’s used for statues and musical instruments; or brass (copper and zinc), which increases mechanical properties and it’s more conductive and it’s used for locks and taps.

It has wide applications, and most of it it’s used for electrical cables, radiators, cauldron, water and gas tubes… In the past, it was used for cowbells and oil lamps, as you can see in the photos.

Steel

Steel is a ferrous material alloy that consists mainly of iron, with a little part of carbon, exactly between 0.1 and 1.76%. It’s found on the Earth’s crust only as iron ore combined with other elements such as oxygen or sulphur. Varying the amount of alloying elements you can control qualities such as hardness, ductility and tensile strength. Steel the most carbon it has, the harder and stronger it is, but it’s also less ductile than iron. Steel is really hard to mould but you can laminate and work it. Its main characteristics are its ductility, malleability, hardness and its medium resistance.

Steel is widely used in the construction of roads, railways, and other infrastructures like beams and girders, as you can see in the photo. Most large modern structures as stadiums, bridges and airports have a steel skeleton. In addition, it’s used in cars. Despite the increasing use of aluminium, steel is still the main material for cars bodies.