Some types of oxidation look really freaking cool.

[jdurg]

Last night I was looking over a bunch of my elements, and I realized that some elements have some really cool looking oxidation to them. Scandium and Bismuth both have a multitude of different colors to them from the different thicknesses of the oxide coating. The scandium in particular looks really neat because the colors are quite pearlescent and the base color is kind of yellowish. The bismuth just has really intense blues, golds, reds, purples, and other colors of the rainbow. Potassium has a neat look to it............. to a certain extent. When the oxidation is first starting, it has a violet colored taffy-looking oxidation to it. Sadly, as the oxidation furthers it becomes a dullen gray to an almost white color. So the nice color only lasts for so long. On the rare-earths like lanthanum, cerium, and praseodymium, the oxidation color is really intense. The luster of the metal is fully lost, but on tope there is a nice coating of the dark blue oxide of lanthanum and the green colored oxides of praseodymium and cerium. Neodymium is particularly interesting because the metal surface has dullen and looks nearly black, but the oxide powder that comes off of it is light pink in color. Really unique.

 

Of all the oxides, however, I have to say that the uranium oxide is the most interesting. Looking at the metal turnings, you can see a wide range of VERY dark colors which have a pearlescent sheen to them and seem to change color depending on the way the piece is held in the light. There are dark purples, blues, greens, reds, oranges, etc. It looks really neat and I wonder how much of that is due to the natural oxidation of the metal and how much is from parts of it which have become other elements. (Though I'm fairly certain due to the incredibly long half-life that the colors are from natural uranium oxidation). Still, it's neat to take the vial out of the lead-lined box and examine the turnings which are sealed in there.

 

I was also happy to continue my research on the uranium metal and come to a final conclusion; the sample size that I have is so freaking small that it poses zero radiological harm to me. A full POUND, that's 454 grams, of depleted uranium has an activity of about 150-175 uCi. So my approximately 1.75 gram sample has an activity level of, at most, 0.67 microCuries. To put that in perspective, the amount of Am-241 used in smoke detectors is 0.9-1 uCi. So the smoke detectors in many houses are far more radioactive than my Uranium metal is. That one really caught me by surprise and showed just how weak uranium really is. I think it's far more of a toxicological hazard than a radiological hazard.

[budullewraagh]

dont forget the crystals you can make from bismuth. thats why it's my favourite

[Tetrahedrite]

dont forget the crystals you can make from bismuth. thats why it's my favourite

They are incredible, I have a large artificially grown crystal with thousands of tiny steps that makes it look like the surface of a CD. Natural bismuth can also display some incredible shapes and colours.

[jdurg]

Some of my Bismuth samples are the nice crystals. Those are the ones with the really intense coloration and look to them. Even on the one crystal I had that I dipped in vinegar to remove the oxidation from it, the coloring is coming back and is a brilliant gold right now.

[jdurg]

Lead also has some neat coloring. Kind of a navy blue type of oxidation with an occasional flash of purple/red on it. Doesn't stand out nearly as much as that on Bismuth, Manganese and Scandium, but it is noticeable. (Manganese is really intense, although after a short while it turns a poop-brown color and isn't so neat looking anymore).

[d22k]

pics?

[budullewraagh]

yeah, care to hook us up?

[jdurg]

www.chemicalforums.com Periodic Table

 

Just click on the link above and use the link on the main page to the Periodic Table. There you can see plenty of pictures of my elements and even download them if you'd like. I have yet to take really close up, detailed pictures, but that may be a project I'll do later on.

[BenSon]

That is one awsome collection how big are those platinum group samples? they must have cost an arm and a leg...

 

~Scott

[jdurg]

Thank you. It took me a long time to put everything together and for many samples I was just in the right place at the right time. Being a repeat customer with many dealers has helped me get some good deals, and I've also had some financial success. I won my office's football pool this past year which earned me over $500, and my poker playing has given me quite a bit of money to spend.

 

The Rhodium is about 1.2 cm wide and 0.7 thick. It weighs around 10-11 grams and I spent $200 on it. This was when Rhodium was only about $800 an ounce. Shortly thereafter, it jumped up to the level it's at right now so I got a GREAT deal.

 

The Iridium is about 2cm in diameter and 0.8mm high. It's 35 grams of pure Iridium and cost me only about $400. So it did cost some money. But that money was well worth it. I got my one ounce palladium bar at Pd's low point, and a few of my silver pieces when silver was pretty low. The rest of the PGMs are about 6mm in diameter and nothing too special. I bought the gold pieces slowly only spending a little bit of money each time, but after a while all the gold has really added up. The vial contains a bit over an ounce of .999 pure gold metal, and some small, less pure nuggets.

 

Another nice thing is that for carbon, it's pretty easy to find some small, rough diamonds that provide a GREAT example of the allotrope at a lower cost than high-grade diamonds. I also found some place that manufactures synthetic diamonds and got two pretty massive samples for only a couple hundred dollars. If they were the real thing (as in coming from the ground), it would have cost probably four times as much.

 

I've just slowly found that buying things a little bit at a time and then upgrading later is the best way to fill out the collection. Over the next few weeks I will be upgrading my Cobalt, Ruthenium, and Rhenium samples since they are my "poorer" specimens and upgrading them wouldn't cost too much. I also would like to get more Gallium metal just to help fill up that container a bit more. Then, I'll purchase more osmium as the finances allow to watch that vial fill up. Ahhhhh.... The choices, the choices.

 

[BenSon]

You should definately get more osmium that metal looks realy nice. About the Gallium you should try melting it in the tube because gallium wets glass and looks really shiney if theres not much oxidation on it.

 

~Scott

[jdurg]

Heh. That's how I got the gallium into that vial. A buddy of mine gave me the gallium in it's original plastic container, but it was too big to fit into the small vial. So I melted it down and poured it into the glass where it finally solidified again. It was very oxidized, however, so I melted it once more and skimmed off the oxidation to leave a nice shiney surface. I want to buy more since I'd love to have that container filled up about halfway with gallium. (I don't want to fill it up too much since Ga expands upon cooling and too much of it in there can crack the glass).

[BenSon]

Its weird how long Gallium stays liquid after its been taken down past its melting point mine satyed liquid for five days (then i put it into the freezer it lasted about 15 mins)...

 

~Scott

[jdurg]

Yeah, that can make it a real bitch to work with the stuff. You want it solidify, but it just doesn't seem to want to get started. Usually if I take a sliver of some plastic and stir the liquid, it will begin to solidify soon thereafter. The fact that it wets glass is also annoying since if you have a small amount but in a big glass vial, if it melts and coats the vial, you really can't bring it back into one solid glob again. Rubidium is kind of the same way, but that's actually a good thing with Rb. I had bought a one gram ampoule of it off of E-Bay before they cracked down on the alkali metals. The little bit was in a small glass ampoule and was about half full, but you could see some heavy oxidation on the surface. I went and put the ampoule in a beaker of boiling hot water and liquified all of the Rb. I then went and swirled the ampoule around so that the metal could coat the glass. It coated about 90% of the ampoule with a small section exposed. It also didn't 'wet' the areas that had dust or other contamination on the inside, but it coated it enough to look really good.

 

Cesium is nice because it melts just from holding the ampoule in your hand and solidifes quite quickly too. I wish I could have gotten my Cesium in a little cleaner of an ampoule though, because the inside of mine is covered with little bits of dust which now show up. So the glass is looking a bit blurry and less clear. (Though that could be miniscule amounts of CsOH which are attacking the glass. Who knows).

[BenSon]

Surprising, i found cesium on ebay but in those ampoules that are heat sealed at both ends. So you can't stand them up, I wouldn't want a highly reactive metal in an ampoule that rolls around. But your right on the rubidium i couldn't find any...CsOH huh well we can only hope

 

~Scott

[jdurg]

Well, you can easily make a holder for the ampoules so that they don't role around, or so that they can be held upright. Look at my halogens. Those are in test tubes that were sealed at one end and I just built a little holder for them. Having it in a white color is very nice because it makes the colors stand out more. If the lighting is right, you can see the green chlorine, the orange bromine, and the purple iodine vapors. Although, it doesn't matter what the lighting is because you can always see the bromine. I guess element collecting has a LOT in common with coin collecting. You first need to set some goals for yourself so you know what you're collecting. Then you need to have a pretty good budget to work with. You need to pay attention to how the items are stored and contained. The main goal is also to get items that have great eye appeal to them. The more eye appeal a sample has, the more expensive it will probably be.

[BenSon]

Well I just poured my gallium from its plastic container into a glass vial. My first couple of attempts i suceeded in getting Gallium everywhere but the bottom of the vial. But i cleaned it all up except a small blob that fell on my floor and continues to evade me...Anyway whats the toxicity of gallium is pretty low huh like id have to ingest a serious amount to get sick right.

 

~Scott

[budullewraagh]

well, it's not healthy, but it's also not toxic, like at all

[jdurg]

Gallium's similar to water in terms of toxicity. Both of them can kill you, but it would be quite the freak accident.

[BenSon]

sweet...

 

~Scott

[H2SO4]

Back to the oxides. I like the bismuth oxide and its crystals, The crystals remind me of an aztec city, they realy are quite buitiful. Copper coxide is also very awesome, same with iron oxide, when they are still thin, otherwise, they turn black. I heard nickel and titanium do this to. I think a bunch of the transitions do.

 

Anyway, where can i get some gallium. Ive just been scouting ebay for some but i can only find Ga and indium alloys. I think the only thing that sucks with Ga is that it stains skin, but so does alot of things, it cant be worse than KMnO4. I just wish mercury wasnt so toxic, otherwise that would be sweet