Of all the vids I've watched, this one nearly convinces me to forge ahead....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShgM07O1rqQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShgM07O1rqQ
Yes, I can get the mercury.....I HAVE a few pounds.......but no one can tell me how to use it. I've been researching amalgamation for several yrs, spent a few hrs just two wks ago with a friend from Nome who described "scraping the sludge off copper plates using a putty knife" after which it's collected and "boiled off" leaving the metals and reclaiming the mercury but here's where things sputter to a halt. NOBODY has ever done this, and perty much everybody opines that "this is the dan'rous part"....I've watched youtube videos, even reread 'Roughing It' just last week, everybody is in agreement up to the part where you actually reclaim the mercury. I know of people "retorting," boiling and even one guy who "boils using dish soap" but I'm very cloudy about HOW....and I'm not interested in just sloshing mercury through the bore and pouring it into a jar permeated with lead...
Several folks I've spaken with have actually used it (or had rings destroyed by it)and describe how it permeates gold, silver and lead things turning to "a paste" and at some point "being saturated" but nobody actually understands the process. Having blown up lots of stuff from rocks to guns to cars and having handled all sorts of dangerous chem's, safely, I MUST understand a thing to attempt it....I understand that most "dangerous" things are the result of ignorance. I am IGNORANT of how to handle mercury.
So at this point mercury is off the table.
Wow, back in the day we played with it. Of course this was when I took my dinosaur to school. We use to rub it on our pennies to make them have a shiny silver look. I guess not knowing about the dangers has allowed us to live to our middle 70s. I remember Dad soaking the ground below our new foundation before it was poured with Chlordane. He also used it in our vegetable I remember following the DDT spraying trucks in hot weather to cool off. In the middle 60s our machine shop had a 3'x10'x4'deep solvent tank. It had a water jacket around the top. We filled it with Trichloroethylene. We had a gas heater unit under it to heat it. We made lugs that screwed into 500lbs bombs for the military. Beside cleaning parts, we cleaned our hands in it. Only thing I noticed, it severely dried out our hands.
Guess if I hadn't been exposed to all of this I would live to be over 100.
In the metal form it is not all that big a deal.
As a vapor it can cause problems.
As a hot vapor it starts to get dangerous.
When present in organic compounds it can be VERY dangerous.
Methyl Mercury was used for years as a calibration material for mass spectrometers.
It gave clean lines for C, H, and Hg.
It is a VERY VERY dangerous compound.
A young woman PhD candidate managed to get a single drop on her skin (above the glove cuff)
She died a few weeks later from mercury poisoning.
The calibration compound was changed.
It is like lead.
Metallic lead is not that big a deal.
Eating shot will pass through.
Organic lead compounds (lead acetate in paint) are very dangerous if ingested.
One old name for lead acetate was 'sugar of lead' since it tastes sweet.
Greg,
To chemically remove lead or copper from bores-
Outers Foul Out units work well.....too clean as a matter of fact!
In the 10 year period I shot Big Bore Handgun Silhouette I shot tens of thousands of cast bullets. The Lewis lead remover worked best for larger bores. For smaller bores, 6mm and 22's a bronze bristle brush wrapped with brass wool worked best.
I've never had a barrel I could randomly switch between cast and jacketed bullets. Just will not work.
Chemical lead removers never seemed to get the job done, but that was 35 years ago.
.
Jerry, is there anything you have not done. To do everything you have said you've done you would have to be 194 years old!
Happy New Years!