Cerium fires are umm....... 'neat'.

[jdurg]

Well, this weekend I had a fun experience with cerium metal. lol. My purchase of a 102 gram block of cerium arrived in the mail on Friday, but it had broken the glass jar it was in during shipping causing oil to slowly ooze out of the crack. Since this would just create a big mess, I decided to take the cerium out and place it in the vial that had my other lump of cerium metal. (The Ce I previously had was a nice, smooth lump of the metal which had a complete coating of green oxidation on it. My new lump is kind of ragged but a LOT bigger with some areas of clean metal and some areas of oxidized metal). Anyway, I went to put my new metal in the jar with the old one only to see that it was a smidgen too big. Damn. Now I had to make some alterations so it would fit and not oxidize away outside of the oil. (Meanwhile I've made a mess with a bunch of oil all over the place. lol). I saw that the reason it wasn't fitting was because there was a little flange on one side that was making it too big for the opening of the vial. I couldn't snip it off, so I brought out the hacksaw.

 

I started to cut the metal and everything was going fine because the oil was acting as a lubricant and holding all of the dust. Suddenly, the oil barrier went away and it was metal on metal. A shower of sparks came off of the cerium and ignited a small lump of shavings/dust that had accumulated. The fire quickly burned itself out and left me with a pile of polishing compound (Cerium oxide), but it kind of caught me by surprise. It was actually pretty neat to see. lol. I tried to get it to ignite again, but it just didn't work. Still, the shower of sparks was fun to play with.

[YT2095]

))

 

don`t waste the oxide, dissolve it in Nitric acid to make the nitrate (duh) then soak filter paper in it, let it dry and then burn off the paper you`ll see a bright white light as the residue is in the flame, it`s the same principal used in Gas mantles, Cerium or Thorium can be used

[jdurg]

Hmm. Well, I don't have any nitric acid so that wasn't able to happen. What I did do is take the cerium oxide and make a paste out of it with some of the mineral oil that was there. I then took this paste and rubbed it on the iridium button I have, the zinc and tin cylinders I have, and basically anything else I wanted to polish up. It worked like a charm! Once I finished rubbing off the oil and took some rubbing alcohol to clean up any residues, the shine coming off of these things is amazing. So I didn't waste the oxide at all. (In fact, it felt kind of good making good use out of it. )

[YT2095]

did you try it on Glass? I know I would have done if that was my plan

[Gilded]

Lol, glad you had fun with it. Every cloud has a silver lining and all that. And what sort of people you got working in the post in U.S. anyway? Didn't you mention in another thread that some of your other sample ampoules had broken in the mail too?

[jdurg]

Yeah, and oddly enough it was some lanthanides as well. lol. Really, it's difficult for them NOT to break. The metals have to be contained under oil, and they are pretty hefty in size. So during shipping they are being thrown around against the inside of the container and eventually they are bound to break.

[Gilded]

Did your non-argon-non-oil lanthanides come in small plastic bags within the vials that you can remove yourself? Mine did, which is good. You'd really have to kick the package Ace Venture Pet Detective style for the bag-vials to break.

[jdurg]

Yes they did. Either in the baggies, or in heavily bubble-wrap filled vials.