Manganese breaks an unusual type of record. In the whole roster of metals none beats this element when it comes to the difference between the price it’s sold at and its actual value as a commodity. It is so cheap that its spot price is measured not in ounces or even kilograms but by the ton. It is a tenth the cost of nickel, another industrial product with similar uses. Coming up with an intrinsic value for this ounce is more or less like trying to calculate the value of a paper clip. Clearly, the price listed for this bar has to be an epic typo, right? Nope.

Manganese refineries deliver a product that looks a little like potato chips. The flakes are shiny on one side and black and mottled on the other. And the list of things you can do with it is basically one: to toss it into a furnace with molten iron to make steel. If you try to melt and cast into a mould it will turn to a messy black lump of oxides well before it actually melts. If you try hammering it into shape it will shatter like glass. Cutting, polishing, lathing or any other type of physical action on pure manganese metal yields nothing but broken ugly bits of less pure manganese.

What’s going on here? While perfectly stable, non-toxic and a seemingly ordinary metal at room temperature, manganese has the singular misfortune of being both extremely brittle and susceptible to oxidation at high temperatures. Many metals, of course, will oxidize easily but none compare to manganese’s dual personality of being practically inert at ambient temps then almost explosively combustible a couple hundred degrees hotter.

This by itself would not be an insurmountable challenge. Metals that oxidize easily can be molten and cast in furnaces that have had the air pumped out and replaced with argon, for example. And, in effect, this is also how manganese is prepared initially as the molten metal forms a thin sheet on the crucible as it cools. However, as noted above, the sheet darkens on one side and shatters the second it is exposed to air. The darkening is as a result of the air’s oxygen attacking the still warm surface facing out and the shattering from simply being scraped off the surface. Using the same casting method it can also be molten into a lump rather than a sheet but as it cools the mass will contract and develop many internal cracks. It basically turns into something like popcorn (you can see this oxide-free variant sold here). Whichever route you take, however, the bottom line is that you simply cannot get pure manganese to form into an intended shape.

Making purposeful shapes of manganese requires a completely different process called sintering, which will be familiar to buyers of tungsten and some of the precious metals. Sintering begins with a chemical process that yields the pure metal in powder form. Under great pressure and heat the powder forms a mass that is outwardly solid but is internally quite weak and spongelike as it’s riddled with voids where the microscopic particles don’t fully touch. All sintering is good for is getting the basic shape down and compact enough that it won’t fall apart at a mere touch like a sand castle. But while tungsten and other metals yield a final or near-finished piece from the sintering process, manganese still requires extra steps. This is because the powder has to be pressed in anoxic chambers and then allowed to fully cool before bringing out into the open. And while sintered tungsten can be worked on without fear of ruining the piece the manganese blanks can’t as the friction of tooling or polishing risk both the feared oxidation as well as new cracks forming from stress. It has to be babied from start to finish including the final step of laser engraving.

In the end, Luciteria was able to commission the making of just fourteen bars at the cost of $400 a pop and a wait time of nearly two years from the first technical discussions. This is why a buck’s worth of metal ends up costing several hundred times more.