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ate all the Oreos posted:Yeah if you can confirm this isn't hella-illegal I'd like a few to just play around with  I'd love more steel to play with
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Jul 27, 2017 05:21
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TerminalSaint posted:Not likely to be an issue, but be aware that railroad police ain't nuttin ta gently caress wit, and will just as happily nail your average joe who grabs a few loose spikes as they would meth addicts pulling poo poo off an active line. Yeah, I know. We dont have them here since this is in Bumfuck TN. Anyway, I will grab some more and if people pay for the shipping I will send them out.
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Jul 27, 2017 05:56
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Double post
Applesnots fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Jul 27, 2017 |
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Jul 27, 2017 06:05
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Yooper posted:Our local scrapyard calls the police anytime anyone brings in obviously railroad related stuff. How do I know? We tore up rails from inside one of our buildings and I had the pleasure of bringing it in to the scrapyard. 15 minutes later and I'm explaining how I'm not a I find chunks of railroad track in my creek, some I can get, most have been there a hundred years. I found a cast iron flywheel in there that is the size of a hula hoop
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Jul 27, 2017 06:35
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 far too many zeros after the decimal (we've got a 5-axis mill with a claimed accuracy of one micron in X/Y/Z in here, it's intimidating) also- hardinge lathes rule
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Jul 27, 2017 12:31
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Hot.
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Jul 27, 2017 14:10
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Is there any way to make a blade that's lighter than traditional steel, i.e. with titanium, but is still as good as steel in every relevant way?
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Jul 27, 2017 18:20
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No. *quickedit* OK, let's be more precise. You can use better steel, you can machine away the steel, and so on. On other materials, you can sacrifice edge holding or ductility or usually both. You could possibly sandwich a steel edge into a titanium or aluminum or whatever blade, but for less effort you could just machine away parts of the steel blade. mekilljoydammit fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jul 27, 2017 |
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Jul 27, 2017 18:23
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Jeb! Repetition posted:Is there any way to make a blade that's lighter than traditional steel, i.e. with titanium, but is still as good as steel in every relevant way? "as good as steel" is a really vague requirement. Steel itself is not a single material - there are thousands of different steel alloys, each with different physical properties and characteristics, and there is no one "best" steel alloy for making a blade. So first you have to start with, what is the blade for, what are its operating conditions and requirements (and cost is always a factor). I'm sure you can come up with a menu of requirements for which a titanium (or tungsten or carbide or ceramic or wooden) blade is the best material. In other words, "every relevant way" is undefined in your question and that makes the question impossible to answer.
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Jul 27, 2017 18:26
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Leperflesh posted:"as good as steel" is a really vague requirement. Steel itself is not a single material - there are thousands of different steel alloys, each with different physical properties and characteristics, and there is no one "best" steel alloy for making a blade. I was thinking like for swords.
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Jul 27, 2017 18:33
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... for what sort of sword? A lot of styles end up wanting at least some mass behind them to store energy from swinging the suckers. If you really want lighter though, that's going to be a ductility-critical thing so you're almost definitely sacrificing edge retention.
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Jul 27, 2017 18:51
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Blades, even swords, have really diverse operating conditions and requirements, so yeah, still can't really say. The other thing about steel blades is that they always involve a compromise between hardness (ability to hold a fine edge) and toughness (ability to bend without snapping catastrophically). Something utilitarian like a cleaver is designed more like an axe than a knife, where a fairly soft steel can be used without compromising the relatively dull convex edge, while something that needs a very fine and keen edge like a razor will have a very tough hard temper that's very prone to breaking if treated roughly. Steel has remarkably-broad mechanical characteristics depending on its temper and composition. Some other materials can meet or surpass some aspects of steel's performance while falling short in others, but nothing out there is Steel But Moreso. tl;dr- if you're writing something just roll with unobtainium or a silly made-up composite
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Jul 27, 2017 19:14
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Or throw in stuff about vacuum arc remelt / vacuum induction melted steel, which sounds badass and might actually produce interesting results.
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Jul 27, 2017 19:16
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Kind of related, what exactly was so good about Damascus steel?
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Jul 27, 2017 19:39
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Jeb! Repetition posted:Kind of related, what exactly was so good about Damascus steel? <pseudomysticism> Nooooobody knows. </pseudomysticism> Actually, that's kinda literally true, but you're then going to get people who do any attempt to recreate it saying "but that's not *real* Damascus steel!" Historically, it was made with Wootz steel, which was imported from India and related regions, but nobody's exactly sure how it was made, or how stuff was forged out of the ingots afterwards. I'm of the opinion that it may be largely a coincidental good mix of impurities (molybdenum, chromium, vanadium, etc) combined with an understanding of how to make high carbon steel a lot earlier than the West did historically. Or maybe I'm wrong!
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Jul 27, 2017 19:55
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1. The mother ore for the OG Indian wootz steel was unusual in that it included trace metals deliberately added to improve performance nowadays- i can't look it up but i think it involved chromium and maybe molybdenum- , and production only stopped once that single ore deposit was played out. 2. It was a crucible steel, smelted in unique conditions (helped by a unique wind-driven blast that produced hotter temps than bellows did), which made it a genuinely-homogenous steel like modern alloys. Producing homogenous steel was typically incredibly labour-intensive historically, to the point that spring steel (the first Western crucible steel) cost as much as precious metals at first.
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Jul 27, 2017 19:55
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No I mean, what did it do better than other steel? Like why was it so prized?
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Jul 27, 2017 20:36
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Back then, most steel was poo poo. Damascus steel had enough carbon content you could actually appreciably harden it, and or enough weird impurities (like, they didn't intend for it to use stuff that's mixed in modern alloy steel, it's just whatever they were melting happened to have that stuff in it) to be relatively tough and hard both.
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Jul 27, 2017 21:11
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Controversial opinion: Swords are for weeb spergatroids. Sightly less controversial opinion: if you want a functional medieval weapon, get a warhammer. Swords were status symbols only good for lording it over the unarmored peasants. Slung Blade fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jul 27, 2017 |
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Jul 27, 2017 21:26
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That's a controversial opinion? Huh.
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Jul 27, 2017 21:27
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I, for one, am outraged.
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Jul 27, 2017 21:38
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Jeb! Repetition posted:No I mean, what did it do better than other steel? Like why was it so prized? It had very good mechanical characteristics largely unparalleled until modern metallurgy emerged in the 1800s, both in terms of toughness/hardness and, as I mentioned, homogeneity. In historical iron, inclusions were very common and the metals chemistry could vary widely, even from one end of a bar to the other. We take it for granted, but a blade that's consistently and reliably strong along its entire length was once something of a luxury. A blade could easily end up with portions softer than the rest, or portions without enough carbon to harden at all, which creates obvious problems when you're entrusting your life to this thing. That's why people with lovely, scarce iron in history mastered pattern-welding and folding/twisting, namely the Japanese and the Norse- they made the most of their poor steel by folding it up a ton to redistribute its unevenness as much as possible. Crucible steel avoided this entirely by mixing the steel while liquid. In the late medieval to early modern periods, steel was often categorized primarily by its homogeneity and priced accordingly- crucible steels were the finest and most expensive, and wootz steel was the sole representative of that type of steel for hundreds of years, which is why it's so noteworthy. As an aside, Sub-Saharan africa had a very advanced ironworking culture in antiquity, and they even used a heated blast (rediscovered in the west in the 1800s) to produce very fine steel in clay smelters. It's not as legendary as wootz steel, but African steel was widely exported elsewhere in Eurasia as a luxury trade good, and IIRC the Romans in particular traded for it wherever possible to produce fine weapons with. Ambrose Burnside fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Jul 27, 2017 |
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Jul 27, 2017 21:49
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Slung Blade posted:Swords were status symbols only good for lording it over the unarmored peasants. Well you just sold me on getting a sword.
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Jul 27, 2017 21:50
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TerminalSaint posted:Well you just sold me on getting a sword. Hammers are easy to get / make. Even for peasants. 
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Jul 27, 2017 22:39
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if we're going down this road, go straight for maximum knight-murdering peasant-accessible solutions with our good friend the goedendag 
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Jul 27, 2017 22:54
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Ambrose Burnside posted:It had very good mechanical characteristics largely unparalleled until modern metallurgy emerged in the 1800s, both in terms of toughness/hardness and, as I mentioned, homogeneity. I heard blades made of steel that's been melted shatter really easily, is that not true?
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Jul 28, 2017 03:05
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So is there no reason to hammer away at swords anymore? You can just cast one, throw it in a 50 ton press, and then heat treat it and it comes out better than any actual sword ever used in combat?
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Jul 28, 2017 03:08
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Jeb! Repetition posted:I heard blades made of steel that's been melted shatter really easily, is that not true? any steel made in the past century or so has by definition been melted (and in all probability remelted and remelted countless times through recycling flows), so no, that's definitely not true. M_Gargantua posted:So is there no reason to hammer away at swords anymore? You can just cast one, throw it in a 50 ton press, and then heat treat it and it comes out better than any actual sword ever used in combat? You're asking if forging a sword is superior to forging a sword through a slightly different method. Closed-die forging and open-die (hammer and anvil) forging are two sides of the same coin. "Better than any actual sword" isn't a very useful metric anyhow, the point is that we take homogeneous, consistent alloys as a given when that was once sufficiently expensive and difficult that it was reserved for only the most critical applications. Ambrose Burnside fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jul 28, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 03:08
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M_Gargantua posted:So is there no reason to hammer away at swords anymore? You can just cast one, throw it in a 50 ton press, and then heat treat it and it comes out better than any actual sword ever used in combat? More likely would be unrolling a spool of fat wire into a huge press but yeah pretty much especially with the control of material composition, temperature and quench rate that we have now. The concept of temperature as a measurable quantity didn't even exist until the 1700s
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Jul 28, 2017 03:16
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Jeb! Repetition posted:I heard blades made of steel that's been melted shatter really easily, is that not true? I think you might be confusing "melting" with quenching? If you take steel from melty-hot to cool really fast by dunking it in water it forms a very hard but brittle crystal structure known as martensite. This absolutely will shatter very easily if used in that form, so the steel is then tempered by re-heating it to lower temperatures (or heating only certain parts of it) to change the crystal structure in controlled ways to make it more flexible or ductile or whatever you need it to be.
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Jul 28, 2017 04:07
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M_Gargantua posted:So is there no reason to hammer away at swords anymore? You can just cast one, throw it in a 50 ton press, and then heat treat it and it comes out better than any actual sword ever used in combat? You can buy a modern machete for under a hundo that would be better than anything the great warriors of antiquity ever wielded.
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Jul 28, 2017 04:07
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Leperflesh posted:You can, and A2 is an air hardening steel, but this is how it's heat treated industrially and if all you do is grind it and then temper it, you will not get the same result: Point taken. I had originally thought I could get it up to red hot with a propane weed burner, quench it in a bucket and then stick it in the oven for an hour but... ugh. $50 for a chisel sounds like a very good deal now. Thank you.
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Jul 28, 2017 16:27
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Jeb! Repetition posted:I heard blades made of steel that's been melted shatter really easily, is that not true? They do compared to naturally foraged steel blades. Problem is it takes so long to grow, that's why swords were expensive, they took so long to mature compared to knives that could be harvested quite quickly, Rapulum_Dei fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 22:52
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DreadLlama posted:Point taken. Well, hold on though. See the thing is, it's the air-hardening alloy you chose that made that whole mess such a mess. You could make a serviceable chisel out of ordinary carbon steel, which has a much, much lower tempering temperature. You'd cut or forge it to shape, you could bring the whole piece up to a uniform non-magnetic temperature using a torch plus some bricks to build a little makeshift "oven", quench it in a bucket of oil, and then temper the whole thing in a toaster oven to maybe 410-420 degrees F. At that point, you'd still have a too-brittle hammering-end, so you'd then clean and polish the metal to a shine, and then take your torch and carefully apply heat to the blunt end, watching the colors that form:  Bring it down to at least a purple or so, but importantly, without letting the heat spread down into your cutting edge end. When you hit the right color, dunk back into the oil and bring it down to room temperature. You're now ready to put your final edge on the sharp end and you'd have a decently good chisel. e. This video demonstrates the final tempering process you can do with a torch pretty well. You can skip the toaster oven and just do it this way if you want: also if you start out with well-annealed carbon steel, you don't even need to heat and quench the entire thing: you can torch-heat just the last two or three inches of the blade end to non-magnetic red hot and quench it, leaving the hammer-end already soft and malleable, suitable for hammering on. Then proceed to temper the cutting tip using this torch technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llRiYk6teSc No doubt you won't have quite the hardness of an A2 or whatever, but people used normal carbon steel chisels for centuries. $50 for a high-quality chisel is still potentially a good deal, mind you! Making your tools by hand is a hobby, a craft, a luxury, or an artistic outlet; it is not, however, a competitive process that is leaving factory owners concerned for their livelihoods. This goes straight to the other concurrent discussion about making a sword: modern manufacturing has such a wide range of available superb-quality materials, incredibly well controlled industrial processes; and scientific understanding of the underlying physics and chemistry; that of course a factory could churn out thousands of swords a day that were far superior to anything any swordsman ever touched before the industrial revolution. That said, pre-industrial swordmakers at times made incredible products, largely through a centuries-long process of trial and error and very high levels of skill passed down through chains of masters and apprentices. In a few cases, legendary manufactories developed products that surpassed everyone else for thousands of miles and created legacies that we still remember today: damascus, toledo, etc. Their accomplishments were no less impressive for failing to meet what a modern factory could churn out, any more than DaVinci was a chump because he failed to invent the 747. As for the steel properties that make a good sword: consider the difference between a rapier and a gladius. A short, fat sword for stabbing armored men in the guts during a close-quarters melee needs to be tough, heavy, sharp, durable, and reasonably cheap to manufacture in large quantities. A rapier must be extremely flexible to avoid breaking when bent, hold a razor edge despite lots of sword-on-sword contact, probably not worry about penetrating armor of any kind, and as a status symbol of the wealthy, being really expensive is just fine and maybe preferable. The alloys and processes used to produce the very best gladius would be quite different from the alloys and processes used to produce the very best rapier. I'd wager that a titanium rapier could maaaybe be made to work, and the lightness would be a potential advantage in courtly dueling; the gladius would be too light, too expensive, and not benefit at all from being made of titanium. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Jul 28, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 23:43
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Ambrose Burnside posted:if we're going down this road, go straight for maximum knight-murdering peasant-accessible solutions with our good friend the goedendag For probably all of human history, prehistory, and most likely well into the history of several previous hominin species, the spear has been the most popular and effective and useful weapon. Even modern armies still affixed a pointy tip to their guns until quite recently, such was the recognized utility of a man with a pointy stick. A sword is an excellent weapon for chopping up people who either don't have a spear they're stabbing you with before you get close enough, or, for when you're wearing so much armor that they can't effectively wound you with their spear. The times in history when one or the other of those factors have prevailed have been probably fairly constrained. A thousand angry peasants with spears is not to be underestimated, even by the most doughty of steel-clad knights armed with the most puissant of swordery. (Said knights figured out pretty quickly that having an even longer spear - a lance - was the way to win.) That said, some of history's most spear-mastering peoples, such as the greeks & kin armed with 25-foot-long spears arranged into phalanxes of troops, were subsequently defeated by men with swords who closed quarters with the spearmen and then chopped off the tips of their spears using their far more maneuverable and edge-sharpened swords. So the supremacy of the spear was, at times, well contested by swordsmen. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 23:59
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Can't easily chop off the steel spear head if its got an aluminum shaft! We need to spin up some production lines, the future of post-apocalyptic warfare is here.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:27
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M_Gargantua posted:Can't easily chop off the steel spear head if its got an aluminum shaft! Or just some steel banding down the shaft of the spear, that was also common. Just another example of an item made better through composite materials, steel and wood, and maybe glue.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:42
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Banding improved durability at the expense of both weight and, uh, expense: you saw it on much shorter infantry spears and I think also on more ceremonial or fancy polearms, but when you have ten thousand peasants you want to arm with pointy sticks, nah.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:52
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Yeah that's true, peasants were cheaper than banded spears. Never hurts to throw more bodies at your enemy.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:55
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Not really metalworking but I learned recently that the Inca had a weapon that used obsidian blades in a wooden frame, arranged edgewise to enable slashing attacks. With knapped glass blades for its edge, it probably holds the honor of being the sharpest weapon ever used in combat. Also a good example of how there is no one "best" sword or material for making one; this might be the sharpest edged weapon ever made, but the blades would just shatter if you struck them on something hard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl  Apparently no original examples exist any more, the last two having been destroyed in a museum fire in Spain, but the conquistadores described it as being able to decapitate a charging horse with a single blow. 
Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 29, 2017 07:31
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