[petecarney]

Mild steel is mercury resistant but might need coating to avoid rust. Most other metals react with mercury.

[petecarney]

Absolutely beautiful. I’d be interested to know what difference in temperature readings can be observed between having the temperature probe in the tube as described or simply strapping it onto the exterior wall of the mercury pool.

[petecarney]

Why use stainless?

Industrial mercury containers are mild steel because iron is the one common metal which won’t amalgamate with mercury while stainless steel pipes carrying mercury contaminated natural gas have suffered corrosion due to chromium being leached.

In short I see nothing wrong with powder coated or epoxy coated mild steel.

-petecarney

[petecarney]

Agreed – the drops of mercury I mentioned are correctly described as an amalgam. It’s the exposure to light which causes the Silver halides to be reduced to Silver. The Mercury treatment is the development step – in which the latent image is amplified to something which can be seen. Agreed, again, on thin films and dag resolution. Cheers.

[petecarney]

Here is my understanding of the process:

1 No H20 vapour, just elemental halogen vapour which reacts with the silver to make halides.
2 Silver halides exposed to light are reduced to tiny crystals of metallic silver.
3 When exposed to mercury vapour, blobs of mercury grow at the sites of the tiny silver crystals. The mercury does not bind to areas of the plate still coated with unreduced halide.
4 The thiosulfate wash removes the halide leaving a matt white image made of tiny drops of mercury on a silver mirror. Yes not really a true positive – it has to catch the light correctly. No mercury halides involved.

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