46 replies to this topic

[fruitfulsteve]

does anyone know how much gum copal costs, as i need to pay for some and i can't find anyone that sells it to get an idea on a fair price also mercurous chloride ?

[Arthur Brown]

If you have formulae using mercury, please get another book, Mercury compounds are all poisonous.

[fruitfulsteve]

Hi Arthur
I'd hoped you would have had an ingenious solution to my cuno3 problem.
Theirs a couple on passfire that i want to try!! but don't panic mercuric chloride is (apparently)the dodgy one, mercurous is (according to passfire not so bad) none the less i won't be i won't be sprinkaling on my chips. apart from penta, any idea who sells it?

[a_bab]

Poisonous doesn't mean it's poisonous just for you, but also for the enviroment.

Some people tend to recycle their neon tubes/tiny mercury batteries while others don't have a problem spreading kilograms of mercury in the enviroment if cheap enough

[fruitfulsteve]

Poisonous doesn't mean it's poisonous just for you, but also for the enviroment.

Some people tend to recycle their neon tubes/tiny mercury batteries while others don't have a problem spreading kilograms of mercury in the enviroment if cheap enough

PASSFIRE reference section chemicals MERCUROUS chloride and it is far from cheap

[a_bab]

That's exactly my point. If it was at the price of KNO3 I bet there will be plenty of nice "blue mercury based stars" fans all over the place, you included.

The truth is, mercury chloride is the only chemical that would decompose to pure chlorine gas when heated, making it probably the best chlorine donor. Chlorinated rubbers/plastics/etc would give HCl in flame. Still, they work quite well, so there is absolutely no excuse to use a mercury compound nowadays.

[fruitfulsteve]

That's exactly my point. If it was at the price of KNO3 I bet there will be plenty of nice "blue mercury based stars" fans all over the place, you included.

The truth is, mercury chloride is the only chemical that would decompose to pure chlorine gas when heated, making it probably the best chlorine donor. Chlorinated rubbers/plastics/etc would give HCl in flame. Still, they work quite well, so there is absolutely no excuse to use a mercury compound nowadays.

did you read the passfire chemicals section on MERCUROUS chloride ?

[a_bab]

I didn't, but I know your point.

Mercurous chloride, also known as calomel is the least toxic mercury compound due to it's low solubility. Making some stars won't kill you, but MY point is not to use mercury due to enviromental concerns. You've got alot to learn along the pyro road.

[fruitfulsteve]

I didn't, but I know your point.

Mercurous chloride, also known as calomel is the least toxic mercury compound due to it's low solubility. Making some stars won't kill you, but MY point is not to use mercury due to enviromental concerns. You've got alot to learn along the pyro road.

I see your point, but pyro is never going to be environmentally friendly. and i presume mercurous chloride once heated some sort of mercury oxide will form which is proberly not so good. What is your view on antimony, barium, plastic shell casings, chlorates, the fuel burned shipping thousands of tonnes of pyro arround the world etc ? on my pyro learning road i intend to see what made these old formulas so good i'm certainly not planning on covering the world in a thin layer of mercury!!

[RFD]

Calomel can be purchased in the Uk,the last amount i had for a job not connected with pyro, if memory serves was about 25 pounds inc carriage for a 100g,very expensive to use for pyro.
I know some of the older chems give good results, but their use harks back to the victorian era where life and enviroment wasnt perhaps quite so important, plenty of good chlorine donors out there that are cheaper and safer to use,sometimes a bit of experimentation is needed to replace the dodgy stuff to get good results,as for coopal gum sounds like it might be similar to red gum or gum arabic,(gum arabic will turn acidic if stored for a long time).
As some have said the newer recipes are used because of chem availability and are safer to use.

[Arthur Brown]

Many of the old recipies had good results, but some had bad hazards. Modern recipies have fewer hazards, and we are missing very few effects really, for their being much safer in manufacture storage and use. Several accidents of old can be traced to chemical incompatibilities that we are now aware of. While the old compounds did work and may be interesting, newer compounds may prove safer.

[seymour]

I see your point, but pyro is never going to be environmentally friendly. and i presume mercurous chloride once heated some sort of mercury oxide will form which is proberly not so good. What is your view on antimony, barium, plastic shell casings, chlorates, the fuel burned shipping thousands of tonnes of pyro arround the world etc ? on my pyro learning road i intend to see what made these old formulas so good i'm certainly not planning on covering the world in a thin layer of mercury!!

Indeed, but why make it worse?

I personally have a similar issue with plastic shells. Not only are they non biodegradable (actually there are some that actually are biodegradable!) as well as a potential safety hazard (sharp fragments) but overall, the product is inferior.

I do not believe that Antimony and Barium accumulate throughout the food chain, but mercury certainly does! Do you eat fish, particularly tuna and other apex predators? If so, aside from the fact that you are almost certainly consuming an endangered species, you are getting the concentrated mercury from all the fish it has eaten, and all the fish they have eaten, and so on. This is one of the main issues with environmental mercury contamination. In parts of Japan for example, the combination of high mercury in the eater and the large amount of fish consumed in the diet has cause shocking mercury poisoning statistics. Deformed babies ect all over the place.

The products of Potassium chlorate decomposition are completely non toxic...

As for the shipping, while I agree that you have a point, and believe that overall buying local is a good thing, consider this...

The greenhouse gas emissions from a cow's worth of steak traveling across the world (from here in NZ to you, as a contemporary and publicized example) are considerably less than the emissions from that cow while it lived. And this is just the emissions. The catastrophic damage done to waterways and erosion from bad farming practices are not a factor in that equation. Excessive globalized shipping, while damaging, is a very small factor in the big picture of us raping the planet.


Well, I got off topic and just revealed myself to be a big environmentalist. Is it a bad time to admit that I too would be intellectually interested in playing with Mercury chloride?

Stay Green everyone.

[pyrotrev]

The truth is, mercury chloride is the only chemical that would decompose to pure chlorine gas when heated, making it probably the best chlorine donor. Chlorinated rubbers/plastics/etc would give HCl in flame. Still, they work quite well, so there is absolutely no excuse to use a mercury compound nowadays.

Not quite true actually, some chlorine donors that contain little or no hydrogen will give Cl rather than HCl - but generally HCl seems to give better colours anyway according to Shimizu, and he's normally right

[fruitfulsteve]

Not quite true actually, some chlorine donors that contain little or no hydrogen will give Cl rather than HCl - but generally HCl seems to give better colours anyway according to Shimizu, and he's normally right

just out of interest do you know which ones?

[fruitfulsteve]

My merurous chloride blue was (even if i do say so myself) pretty dam blue. However i don't think it's as good as paris green even if it was i won't be using it every day so if you see any tunas you can tell them my place is no longer a no go area
Also whilst i have the attention of enviro pyro i would like to point out that i (well Meshell actually) recycle 2 thirds(by volume)of our domestic waste, i walk or ride my motor cycle rather than drive my van whenever possible, and generally try to be enviromentally considerate. But as i've allready mentioned pyro is not enviro friendly, some stars blow blind(even chlorate ones) barium and antimony may not spread up the food chain but what go's up must come down and some of it will land on farmer giles crops. Then theirs sulphur that i'm sure decomposes into something pretty nasty(i personally like the smell) but they wouldn't take it out of fuel if it's good for you/the enviroment.As for kiwi cattle and their globe trotting, pyro(unlike cattle) dosn't produce methane if you leave it where it is!!
I won't go on i don't want to give ammo to the anti pyros out their!!