[Elecraft] Toxic Things

[Fred Jensen]

I like the people on this list a great deal.  Please be careful. 
Someone said you could eat mercury.  Don't.  Don't even handle it.  It 
is a heavy metal like lead and as a vapor is extremely toxic.  And 
mercury vaporizes slowly at room temperatures.  Like all heavy metals, 
once it is inside you, it is extremely difficult to remove.

Metallic mercury is a major pollutant here in N. CA and in the Comstock 
in NW NV.  During the gold rush, many tons of it were used in the 
extraction of the gold from the crushed quartz 150+ years ago, and well 
into the 20th century.  A great deal of it ended up in mine tailings, as 
did the cyanide, also used in the extraction process and also *somewhat* 
toxic [used to be used in California's gas chamber].  There are a huge 
number of abandoned gold mines in our area.

Over time, metallic mercury forms very toxic compounds which have washed 
out into the streams, rivers, and lakes.  Much of it ends up in the 
Sacramento/San Joaquin delta and San Francisco Bay, where it climbs the 
food chain and is now in many of the fish in dangerous quantities. 
Lahontan Reservoir east of Carson City is contaminated as are many other 
waterways.

I know we OF's used to play with Hg as kids.  We also used carbon 
tetrachloride, MEK, trichlorethylene, and other things you can't buy and 
shouldn't be using now.  I liked cadmium-plated steel chassis for my 
home brew projects because it was easy to solder to them.  Cd is a heavy 
metal and is very toxic.  Wash your hands twice after working on your 
Elecraft kits.  Don't breath solder fumes.  Even a small fan to blow the 
fumes away from you is a major improvement over nothing.

We all have our stories from olden days, but I'd like to think we've all 
learned something in the last 50 or 60 years [e.g. don't eat a lot of 
the fish you catch in San Francisco Bay].  I'd like the Elecrafters to 
be sticking around for a long time and in good health.

73,

Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 2007 CQP Oct 6-7
- www.cqp.org