OT: Fun things to do with Mercury - Any?

Around here HVAC wholesale houses collect old 'stats with mercury. Greg

I had a small plastic vial filled with about a liquid ounce of mercury left over from stuff I did 40+ years ago. There seemed little likelyhood that I'd find a need for it again.

A couple of years ago I heard that the Board of Health in the next town to us, Burlington, Taxachusetts, was collecting mercury thermometers from citizens. I called them about dropping off my mercury and they said, "Sure, just make sure it's in a double container. I wrapped the vial in paper, put it inside an old jam jar and left it with them.

HTH,

Jeff

Nasty? It's lovely !

eBay it - barometer restorers are paying good money for mercury. OTOH, you can't post it to them (check local rules for packaging).

I'd hang onto it. Mercury is easy and safe to store (double bottle it in Nalgene bottles if you're worried about dropping it).

When I was a kid we used to collect 100s (yes, 100s) of lbs of mercury from old arc rectifiers and sell it for scrap. I wish I still had one of those old octopus rectifiers. One day we dropped a carboy of mercury whilst lifting it onto the wagon - little droplets of mercury used to show up behind benches in the garage for years afterwards.

BTW - If you do spill mercury, clean it up with powdered sulphur. It renders it almost inert and easily swept up.

Throw it away wherever fluorescent lamp tubes are accepted. These lamps have mercury in them. So do the street lamps with the bluish light.

The standard way to clean up loose mercury metal was with finely powdered sulphur.

I bet.

Joe Gwinn

:-)

Of course, you could always dip a copper cent into it, the confuse the beejeezus out of the the local shopkeepers with your newly-acquired "silver penny".

-- Jeff R.

Fred Fowler III wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Try here:

On Sat, 07 Jan 2006 23:38:22 +0000, Andy Dingley scribed:

It is pretty neat actually. So, as long as I don't rub it over my body, is it inert enough to keep down in the cellar? Close to my mother-in law for example?

Aww, I reckon a nice Brown Recluse would take care of that problem without wasting something so nice from the periodic table...

I will hang on to it. Thanks.

Freddie

I have 4 pounds of it in my basement. It's been there for around 15 years, in its original plastic bottle, with no problem. But I do have the bottle inside of a plastic, screw-top peanut butter jar, just in case.

I use it to clean the lead out of the muzzle brake on my Hi-Standard Supermatic. That's about it, and that only takes care of maybe two ounces per lifetime.

I offered to make a mercury-pool electric motor as a demo for my son's high-school physics class, but the teacher nearly had a heart attack when I suggested it.

- Ed Huntress

throw it in the trash if you don't want it, or mail it to me.

Or for fun mix it with zinc. It will make a fun amalgam that can be frozen at room temp, but melt in your hand. Rubber gloves might be a good idea. I've always been told that zinc alamgams are the safer of mercury mixtures. I just treat them like mercury anways.

When I was in high school in the early 50's, one of the chenistry experiments was to distill mercury from one of it's compounds. Don't remember which one. Every year the students would use the resultant mercury to coat coins. Coins were mostly silver in those days. The coins then were then put into general circulation. I have never heard of a hot spot of any mercury related diseases where I grew up.

Up in the California Mother Lode the bottom of the streams are laced with mercury lost by the placer miners. When the first sucker dredges were used in the 50's some of them brought up much more mercury than gold. There dosen't seem to be a rash of mercury poisioning in Calif. from eating fish from these streams.

The gist of this is that there does not seen to be much risk from mercury as a metal. Most of the fear is caused by the knee jerk respose of the bureacrats who set the standards.

Chuck P.

Of the 2 miling things to make me die a hirrible death that are now prohibited whyt not go for the obvious one

i'm a thousand percent more likely to be turned into salsa in a car wreck than to be lead poisoned mercury poisoned get a cancer related to welding.

On Sat, 7 Jan 2006 19:28:28 -0500, "Ed Huntress" scribed:

Excellent! I will hang on to to the silver liquid for as much time as I need to use it. Or as Peter Griffen says... Till the Sox Win...

Freddie

Whatever you do with it don't free it from the vessel. A friend of mine in elementary school spilled about 5 lbs of the stuff in the lobby of the school. We tried to scrape it up with the edges of paper and some of it just got swept out the door. Pretty sure we went home early that day in 1966

Nou you know how witch hunts were started in the 1600 hundreds. Some compounds of mecury are indeed very poisonous, just like the elements that make up salt. Lead is about the same catagory. Wait till one of the witch hunters find out the a lot of metal has lead in it. 12L14 for example. Yet, no one says anything about all the crap that they stuff in food so it lasts forever but fills your system with poisons.

John

I'll be 71 in a few days. I'm still able to write much of my own software, shoot most of my arrows 9 or better. Those things I do suffer from have never been related to Hg by even the most paranoid beuocrats. This is despite the fact that my own rather sophisticated chem lab in my teens and worked with Hg diffusion pumps in University.

My point is this: Who is making money out of the current Hg and Pb scares? It is obvious that we are not dealing with "Clear and present danger".

Ted

Its also relatively easy to turn it into a fulminate.

Gunner

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.

Theodore Dalrymple,

Also used in open tubs to displace contaminants from botanicals. Related to me by my former botany instructor. As a student he collected plant materials. Took them back to the lab. Using bare hands, pushed the plants under the surface of the mercury. the bugs and debris would float and were disposed. He's nearly 90 now and remains in good health.

Bulk mercury and lead aren't very toxic: kids used to chew lead because it apparently tastes slightly sweetly, and it didn't kill (but who knows how many IQ points it shaved off). The vapor pressure of Hg at room temperature is rather small.

The nastiness begins when you get small particles, like in soldering paste which contains finely ground Pb/Sn (European ROHS rules will take care of that). Things get really nasty with organometallic compounds, that may be created e.g. when there is a fire in a room that had a mercury spill. Karen Wetterhahn was a Dartmouth chemistry prof who died after having a drop of dimethyl mercury diffuse into her double-gloved hand several years ago.

Isn't there a whiff of Keystone Cops about these guys in isolation suits showing up to pick up the little gob of mercury we used to play with as kids???? Didn't hurt me in the 50+ years since. MadDog