forging tungsten carbide

[bigfootnampa]

Tungsten carbide is INCREDIBLY DENSE!  I once acquired a few pieces of solid rod with intent to use as burnishing rods.  Small chunks seemed vastly heavier than lead would!  Extremely dense and very brittle... it would be a nightmare to adapt for aircraft uses... generally... I could see it for small specialized parts.

[ThomasPowers]

I could see it used for weights like where DU has sometimes been used.  I got to hold a Tungsten Collimator up at the Black Hole of Los Alamos back in the day.  It is ridiculously dense.

[Frosty]

Tungsten weighs 1,200lbs/cu foot or 19,250 kg/cu meter. Lead weighs 708 lb/ cu foot. Tungsten is VERY brittle. Not only would your plane just sink into warm asphalt it could only support it's own weight after it collapsed and crumbled. 

Tig torch tungstens snap if you mishandle them.

Frosty The Lucky.

[pnut]

It was used in certain sabot rounds as a penetrating rod. Thomas mentioned depleted uranium which made me think of it. I either have/had some darts that have tungsten barrels. 

Pnut

[Anachronist58]

In aircraft, Ceramics will likely stand in for aluminum, titanium, inconel, and superalloys - tungsten carbide - not so much.

Robert Taylor

[George N. M.]

I use a .50 caliber armor piercing core as a center punch.  The way you can tell a tungsten carbide core from a steel core is that the AP core does not have a groove around it because it is designed to shed its copper jacket on impact.  A regular ball round with a steel core has a groove to help retain the copper jacket.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."