Video gamers, space sim fans in particular, will remember thulium as one of the key strategic resources to fight over across the reaches of the galaxies. In Real Life™ thulium, while rare, is unfortunately pretty useless. That rarity plays a part, sure, because rare commodities tend to be pricey so that unless they have some remarkable characteristic the natural thing to do is look for some cheaper alternative. And that’s just it, this metal isn’t merely unremarkable for almost all applications but, on top of that and being expensive, it’s also a machinist’s nightmare.

The lab that currently produces our line of cubes practically snarls every time we reorder. Other suppliers have made prototype runs then, on followup orders, the smiles are there but with hefty price bumps suggesting that they had no idea what they were getting into on the first round. And the truth is that the metal just does not like to be formed into shapes. In particular, when polishing or filing little bits catch and drag out chunks from beneath much like a hand knit sweater coming undone from a flyaway thread.

While there were no juicy notes nor drama accompanying this first shipment of these thulium bars we understand that the metallurgy of pure rare earth metals is still in its infancy. Among other variables like extended wait times, this directly translates to heavy markups from the base cost of the materials. Given their high cost, only ten were produced and we really hope that if we sell out of this pilot batch that - given our previous experience - a repeat order won’t turn out to be even costlier!