$25 Million Hunk of Metal?

[PhiloVance]

ShibbOleth

Cletus: This heayh pop jes tase fonny, Joe-Bob.
Joe-Bob: Cud be they be puttin ty-tay-ne-um init these days, cain’t tell fer shure, tho.

[DougC]

• • • There’s some mental hobo walking around Manhattan with this thing on his head, and for the first time in decades, he doesn’t hear the voices… - MC

[ElvisL1ves]

*Originally posted by scotth *
**Well, it does specify it as an engine part.

But, I can’t think of a single part in a turbojet/turbofan engine that would meet this description. (half oval, about half the size of a hub cap?)

How 'bout parts from developmental stuff, say a ramjet or scramjet maybe. This might explain the unusual shape, cost, and not specifying what plane it is from.

ElvisL1ves Does this make any sense to you? **

All I’m sure of is that the reporter didn’t have much background in the field, and neither did the people s/he was getting information from, and that the $25 million figure is bogus. That’s the price of an entire new bizjet, ftr, and more than the sale price of any single entire engine I know of.

I’ll take a shot and say that parts strapped to the back of an open (!) truck would almost certainly be a production lot of raw forgings or castings, not finished parts, which would normally go in wooden crates or heavy-gauge plastic boxes. So Kamandi, I think the number is shifted more like 4 decimals than 2, if it’s a single-piece price.

The description of the geometry is just too vague to guess what it was, sorry. There are, however, a lot of nonaxisymmetric doodads on the outside - not everything rotates.

[Kamandi]

*Originally posted by ElvisL1ves *
I’ll take a shot and say that parts strapped to the back of an open (!) truck would almost certainly be a production lot of raw forgings or castings, not finished parts, which would normally go in wooden crates or heavy-gauge plastic boxes.

That had occurred to me as well. Most large titanium parts I’ve seen have been made from forgings or castings, not hogged out of billets.

[scotth]

*Originally posted by ElvisL1ves *
**

*Originally posted by scotth *
**Well, it does specify it as an engine part.

But, I can’t think of a single part in a turbojet/turbofan engine that would meet this description. (half oval, about half the size of a hub cap?)

How 'bout parts from developmental stuff, say a ramjet or scramjet maybe. This might explain the unusual shape, cost, and not specifying what plane it is from.

ElvisL1ves Does this make any sense to you? **

All I’m sure of is that the reporter didn’t have much background in the field, and neither did the people s/he was getting information from, and that the $25 million figure is bogus. That’s the price of an entire new bizjet, ftr, and more than the sale price of any single entire engine I know of.

I’ll take a shot and say that parts strapped to the back of an open (!) truck would almost certainly be a production lot of raw forgings or castings, not finished parts, which would normally go in wooden crates or heavy-gauge plastic boxes. So Kamandi, I think the number is shifted more like 4 decimals than 2, if it’s a single-piece price.

The description of the geometry is just too vague to guess what it was, sorry. There are, however, a lot of nonaxisymmetric doodads on the outside - not everything rotates. **

I would agree that it seems much more likely that the news story has at least a few facts scrambled. In the odd case that it was factually, correct, it would be interesting to find out what it is exactly.