I can't ID bizarre tenon material

[LatakiaLover]

It's used glue-in style, exactly like Delrin.

It looks like black vulcanite, color-wise. Under super-bright lights and magnification, it is only VERY faintly more gray.

The weird part? It's so tough that super-sharp tools barely touch the stuff when using normal pressure/force. Think Delrin-smooth & slippery, but almost ceramic hard.

When you do use enough pressure to get it to cut, the micro-dust produced is very light gray.

The pipe I encountered it on is Danish, so the material might be available in Europe but not North America (?)

Ideas?

[LatakiaLover]

A quick Net search of characteristics points toward this stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high ... lyethylene

Anyone here used it?

[Tyler]

Interesting...I wonder if behaves with glue any better than delrin?

[andrew]

Guessing by the description it might be worse.

[andrew]

I've bought the stuff in sheets before. I used it for abrasion resistant parts. Very similar to delrin. Are you sure it isn't the fiberglass impregnated delrin? PTFE?

[Tyler]

Guessing by the description it might be worse.

One would think.

[LatakiaLover]

Interesting.

It turns out that there are several DOZEN grades and formulations of Delrin, many of which have been "toughened."

Little doubt what I came up against is one of them. Impossible to know which without lab testing, of course.

There is no advantage to using it that I can see, though. The stuff is a PiG BITCH to fabricate, while the common sort is a dream to work with and is plenty strong enough for pipes.

http://plastics.dupont.com/plastics/pdf ... H76836.pdf

[oklahoma red]

If the stuff is making "dust" then I would consider it "filled" with something, possibly glass fiber which is a very common filler for all sorts of plastics.
If it is not filled then then it should shave off very clean and make no dust unless your tools are incredibly dull which I'm quite sure yours are not.
Have you considered that it might be carbon fiber tubing? I know for a fact that Eltang is using it (not aware tho if he's using it for tenons) and I'm also using it right now on a project. I'm going to try to make it to KC next month and if I do I'll show you what I'm doing with it. The tubing I have is not super black but has a tinge of gray to it, most likely from the fiber and the pultrusion process used to make it. It is unbelievably stiff and weighs next to nothing.
Carbon fiber tubing will definitely make some dust no matter how sharp the cutter is.

[wdteipen]

I was going to suggest carbon fiber also. I know of at least one pipemaker who I spoke to at Chicago that was using it in lieu of stainless for tenons on bamboo.

[Alden]

Unicorn Oosik maybe ?

[LatakiaLover]

Thought I'd comment on this UberTenon concept as a public service announcement.

As makers, PLEASE resist the urge to use them as your default. (To make some otherwise un-doably small or specialized design possible, maybe, but otherwise, no.)

Why? Two main reasons: 1) the stuff is so strong and rigid that a routine dropped-pipe repair (snapped-off tenon), becomes an exploded shank that's not always possible to fix, and can't be done invisibly when it can be fixed. 2) airway tuning/enlargement---which many smokers legitimately prefer (Hell, Rick Newcombe basically wrote a book about it)---becomes impossible. It would piss me off, anyway, to discover that a pipe had a non-modifiable airway AFTER I had bought and smoked it.

There. I feel better now.