Hardfacing for valve seats and saw teeth — contains no iron at all.
A fusible metal for safety plugs — and the cadmium-free spoon prank.
Hallmarked 925 — jewellery and the good cutlery.
Liquid at room temperature — the thermometer filling that replaced mercury.
The glowing wire in a toaster and a hair dryer.
Work-hardens under impact: rock crushers and prison bars.
Contains no silver at all — cheap cutlery and saxophone bodies.
The alloy that gave an entire age its name.
The coating on shed roofing that outlasts plain galvanising.
Cuts while glowing red without losing its edge — the original T1 drill-bit steel.
Nickel superalloy for jet exhaust ducts, bellows and seawater piping.
Plumbers' silver solder — joins copper pipe without melting it.
The laminated core inside every transformer and motor.
Dental crowns and hip joints — hard, tough, biocompatible.
Cannon barrels once, steam fittings and bearings ever since.
The 1930s implant alloy still used for joints and dentures.
The feedstock every stainless steel mill buys by the shipload.
The all-purpose structural aluminum: extrusions, frames, boat hulls.
Heating element wire for kilns and vape coils.
The castable aluminum of engine blocks and gearbox housings.
Twenty alloys, and for each one you name the chemical elements it's made from. Steel is iron and carbon. Brass is copper and zinc. Nitinol is nickel and titanium — the name is doing you a favour on that one.
This is the periodic table from the other direction: instead of recalling where an element sits, you work out which elements had to be melted together to make the metal in your hand. You get ONE attempt per alloy, and every recipe is graded together at the end of the run.
The bank holds 72 alloys and every run draws a fresh 20, weighted towards the ones you've actually heard of: ten common, six tricky, four specialist.