[TheForge] Re: Pickling solutions

[Mike Spencer]

Schade> I'm guessing that you have already read "Uncle Tungsten" by
Schade> O. Sacks.

zYes, indeed.  Sacks' books make great and well-received gifts for
Peggy and then I get to read them too.  "The Man Who Mistook His Wife
for a Hat" got us started.

Like Sacks, I never opened my bottle of hydrofluoric acid because I
was too scared of it.  I later learned that we had both been wise, not
just chicken.

I just went and browsed UT again, now that you mentioned it.  I'm
going to have to try the mercury on aluminum trick.  (I've kept some
mercury around in case I wanted sometime to try some amalgam gilding.)
I don't know how I missed that on the first read.  Jeez, if that works
easily, you *really* don't want to ship carboys of mercury in an
aluminum hulled boat, do you?

Getting waayyy off topic...

Is anybody else working their way through Neal Stephenson's fat books?

   Cryptonomicon
   Quicksilver
   The Confusion
   The System of the World

Came to mind because of the theme of quicksilver that appears in
passing in the first one and runs like shiny thread through the
others.  The last three have a hilarious take on Robert Hooke, Newton,
Leibnitz, Loius XIV, William of Orange and others.  The making of
Wootz steel and "watered steel blades" come into the story briefly.
There's one amusing scene in a blacksmith's shop in 17th c. Paris.

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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