jdurg

If you want to see my collection, click on this link and you'll be able to download a 5MB .png file which is all of the elements in my collection from Hydrogen through Bismuth. (The fluorine is not mine, nor is the promethium and technetium. I just included them since the picture would look incredibly stupid with three big holes in there). Element collecting is an expensive hobby, especially if you want nicely sized samples of good purity. The "noble metals" will run over a thousand dollars to collect them, and the alkali metals and halogens can get kind of pricey, not to mention dangerous. A great source for elements in the UK is at www.element-collection.com , and for those in the USA you can go to www.elementsales.com where Dave Hamric sells virtually everything at a GREAT price. Dave will ship internationally, I believe, but you'd have to ask him via e-mail. I do know that he won't ship the alkali metals and some of the other more dangerous ones. But he has some great samples and has begun to ampoule a ton of things as well. (Having bromine in an ampoule is fantastic since it's permanently sealed and won't leach through the glass).

A peroxide is a compound with an -O-O- bond somewhere in it. So Hydrogen Peroxide is H-O-O-H, and an organic peroxide is R-O-O-R(or H).

Be sure to filter it before you permanently bottle it. If you don't, it will have this nasty tasting grain in the brew that really doesn't make it taste all that great.

Well, I'm not really 100% sure about this case, but if you read the MSDS for some common stuff like sugar and water, it can get kind of funny in terms of how serious they take things. Since society has evolved to the point where nothing is your fault and anything that goes wrong is someone else's fault, MSDS sheets have to mention every possible thing that can happen irregardless of how remote the chances of it happening are.

Don't EVER say that. You do NOT want two feet of snow. It makes driving an utter bitch.......... walking a pain in the ass.......... and having to get to work next to impossible, yet you still have to show up on time. Snow is not fun once you have to drive in it.

With nitrogen triiodide, even if it's wet it will still decompose. It is NOT something that you want to make large quantities of and store away. It's much better to just make the little bit you need as you need it. Over time, it will slowly decompose and you'll lose the compound that you've created. It's because of nitrogen triiodide, however, that I really began collecting elements and have had so much fun with them. What's even more fun is if you mix some sugar into the solution with the KI, I2 and NH3. This way, when the triiodide has formed and is drying out, the sugar will attract bees and insects towards your high explosive. Then when the bee/hornet goes to suck up some of the sugar.......... KABOOM!!!!!!!! The insect is no more. lmao.

Though the exceptions would be nitroglycerine and the nitrogen trihalides. (NI3, NBr3, NCl3). Those high explosives will go off if you fart. heh.

I paid about 133 bucks for my 5-gram ampoule of cesium when I bought it from a seller in Austria about a year ago.

Nice site, but in order to purchase from them you must be a registered company. I.E. you have to prove that you are not just a sole individual. So it's not going to help the random person trying to collect elements.

You can spill liquid nitrogen on youself without too much trouble. I've done it many times. As long as it's not a lot of liquid, it will just sting for a bit and you'll feel reallllllllllllllly cold. Your body heat is able to boil away all the liquid nitrogen that is in direct contact with your skin and forms a small protective layer. However, if there is too much liquid nitrogen then the protective layer dissapears and your flesh begins to freeze. But in chem lab we used to always just spill a little on ourselves and it really did nothing. We also made LOx in our p-chem lab. We simply got a small, uninsulate cup of liquid nitrogen and put it on a little rack above a small, insulated beaker. The coldness of the liquid N2 cause LOx to form on the outside of the cup and drip into the beaker. We then sped things up by taking one of those small welding cylinders of oxygen and sprayed it onto the cup. Pretty soon we had a decent amount of sky blue liquid in the thermal beaker.

Yeah, HF is pretty weak because the Fluoride ion really likes to hold on to the Hydrogen atom, therefore it does not like to dissociate into H+ and F-. I think hydrofluoric acid kind of proves how arbitrary the "strong"/"weak" designations are when describing acids. (I.E. HF is weak, but I'd rather spill a strong acid such as HCl on my hand than HF).

Heh. Yeah, it didn't help that they stored their acidic wines in lead jugs, and in order to combat the tartness of the acid they added "sugar of lead" to it. Hehe. Well, I guess you can do a lot of 'not-so-smart' things when you don't know how dangerous something is.

Heh. Don't be impersonating Pink Floyd. "All in all you're just a-nother brick in the wall." That would probably be painful. ;-)

The Romans liked to used lead acetate to sweeten things because it was plentiful, cheap, and easy to use. Sadly, they didn't realize that it was killing them. heh

They just take normal air and compress it, then decompress it. They do this numerous times and it causes the air to cool down a tremendous amount. Once they've gotten the air liquified, they slowly let it warm up and collect all the different gasses as they boil off, then repeat the procedure for each of the different gasses in order to liquify them.

Diamonds really aren't that rare. As stated earlier in the thread, it's the DeBeers Cartel that is jacking up the prices of them. There really is no reason why they should be priced so high. Also, graphite is the more stable form of Carbon. A diamond is NOT forever, even though the slogan says so. At room temperature and pressure, diamonds will slowly convert to graphite. However, the speed at which this occurs is so fantastically slow that we really never see it happening.

Actually, I have heard of that equation too. In one of my chemistry Textbooks, they showed how if you know the Heat of Vaporization for a compound and it's vapor pressure at one temperature, you can figure out its vapor pressure at any other temperature without having to use any of those constants. So that's what I did and got a result I was happy with.

I would if I could. heh. When we did this, it was simply taking some liquid bromine and putting it in a test tube. We then heated the test tube to warm the bromine and make a dense vapor, then we put an intense trio of propane flames to the top part of the tube until it melted shut, thus making an ampoule. The tube was then slowly cooled down. So the pressure inside the tube is probably close to one atmosphere. After reading through my chemistry textbooks, I also realized that the bromine cannot boil in the sealed tube. Boiling cannot occur in a closed container, because as the vapor pressure increases, less vapor will be able to form. I did a rough calculation, and the difference in vapor pressure at room temperature and at about 105 degrees Fahrenheit would result in perhaps 0.005 mL of bromine vaporizing inside the tube. So this thing is pretty safe.

Well, the ringing in my ears and the fragments of a plastic container which I currently have all over my basement is a pretty good indication that I found something which is not all too safe. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I had a 10 mL sample of bromine which was stored in an amber glass bottle as part of my element collection. Sadly, that bromine was eating through the lid of the bottle and corroding the container it was stored in. This past week, I went to buddy of mine's place and had about 4 mL or so of the bromine permanently sealed in a glass ampoule. It is no longer leaching through and looks great next to my chlorine and iodine ampoules. I donated the rest of the bromine to my pal for doing me the huge favor, and just brought the amber glass bottle back. Today I was bored so I decided to clean it out by taking some ammonia solution and pouring it in the bottle and then collecting it in a flimsy plastic cup. (Boy am I glad I used a flimsy plastic cup). I let it sit around in my basement for a little while then went back to take a look at it. There was an oily red liquid on the top in a few tiny droplets. It wasn't a heckuva lot, maybe about the size of a popcorn kernal each in a total of five droplets. Knowing that it was probably a nitrogen trihalide that I was looking at, I was very cautious. I took a long yardstick and just jiggled the cup for a little bit. Nothing much happened. I then jiggled it a little bit more and KA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!! It detonated with violent speed and echoed loudly off the basement walls. Boy those nitrogen trihalides are impressively powerful.

The tube was inside the fire until the borosilicate glass melted evenly all around, then the tube was "pulled" until it sealed off in a perfect cone shape at the top. The tube itself was VERY hot to the touch, and the inside of the glass was filled with a dark bromine vapor. So I'd say that while the liquid bromine itself wasn't at its boiling point, the "empty space" inside the tube was pretty warm. With all the calculations I've done, having the tube at about 105 degrees should be okay as long as more of the bromine inside doesn't vaporize. Again, I don't think an appreciable amount will vaporize as the gas pressure inside will reduce it's ability to evaporate, and the equillibrium with the vapor already in there will prevent more from vaporizing. This is a case where really the only problem is the increase in temperature which will increase the pressure of the gas inside there. I just wish I knew how many atmospheres the vials can withstand.

Yeah. When you have the proper stoichiometic ratio of reactants, as you would get when you electrolyze the eventual product, the reaction proceeds at an incredible rate and with a loud result. What's even more frightening is if you have some platinum wire and put that at the end of a long stick, then put that platinum wire inside the hydrogen/oxygen mixture. It will immediately go BOOM as the platinum catalyzes the reaction.