At first glance this ugly cube seems unworthy of a place in a collection. They may come with . But the battle-scarred little things have a story to tell.

Manganese is a rather ordinary and plentiful metal that gets little attention outside of the engineering offices of your average steel refinery. Large amounts are used in the making of many different types of alloys where it helps soak up excess contaminants, among other desirable traits.

But go ahead. Look for a piece of anything made out of pure manganese metal and you won't find it. Google manganese metal and you'll get page after page of industrial, butt-ugly looking things that look like something you'd scrape off your shoe while wincing. Attractive looking manganese metal bits and widgets are just about as common as rocking horse poop.

Why?

Manganese, it turns out, is an exceptionally difficult metal to obtain in high purity OR machine into a recognizable shape when in its pure state. The reason is locked up in arcane details of chemistry the upshot of which is that while the metal is perfectly docile at room temperature when heated it becomes highly susceptible to oxidation. And almost every type of machining operation involves friction, which of course creates heat... which readily ruins the Mn sample. 

The making of this high-purity cube therefore required overcoming two major challenges. First, it needed to be purified beyond the usually seen grades of 98-99%. As mentioned above, one of manganese's most desirable properties is that it scoops up contaminants from steel alloys. This means that divorcing it from its catch is going to take a lot of effort. Secondly, to overcome the problems created through friction, the lab has resorted to a fancy process called sintering. Usually used with rare precious metals, sintering involves chemically treating the material to render it into fine powder. It is then scooped up into an oversized mold which is hydraulically pressed on all sides while simultaneously subjected to high temperatures (and in the case of manganese in particular doing so in the absence of oxygen). The result is a block that appears every bit an ordinary, well, block of metal. And that’s it. Each one will receive its finishing touches to remove small imperfections and also the laser engraving to christen it with the ID from the periodic table but at that point it’s pretty much ready for primetime.

What? Wait, what’s then with those brown stains that make it look like rusting war relics and the rough finish that make it look more like masonry than a collectible? Well, consider the alternative. A prettier version - one with mirror polishing even - would need to be alloyed with some other metal otherwise the dreaded friction of polishing would ruin it.. In the end we’d rather anything but lose purity. The rusting blocks will grow on you. Builds character ;-)

One last thing. Sintering robs density because all that powder is pushed into a solid but still leaves millions of microscopic pores within. For this reason the mass of each 10mm cube is only about 6.2g (92±1g for the 25.4mm) which is about 10% lower than pure manganese would otherwise be.