Gallium

Where can a guy get some gallium for cheap? Maybe does anyone have some they would want to trade for some mercury?

Oh man I wish...

I used to be an element collector, but gallium was one of the ones that stopped me. (Indium was the other.) They are both so cool, but wherever I looked, I could not find it for even a moderate price. It's funny that uranium is cheaper than gallium.

-Mark

Yeah It sucks not having a job right now. I can't buy all the stuff I want anymore.
I used to have 6 lbs of pure sodium metal. That was lots of fun.
What are iridium's properties?

http://www.emovendo.net/magnets/gallium/?gclid=CPXY5tKB2ZYCFRdatAodiXmb2Q

Not a lot, but seems accesible.How much do you want? :-/

Jesus. $1299 for a Kilo. Can't I just go out and find a mine of this stuff somewhere, or an underground lake of it..... that would be nice. At $1299 a kilo I'd be rich.

yobresal said:

Jesus. $1299 for a Kilo. Can't I just go out and find a mine of this stuff somewhere, or an underground lake of it..... that would be nice. At $1299 a kilo I'd be rich.

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Yea but it's like 32 grams for 65 bucks, you can get that if you're just collecting.They say there are trace amounts of it in some ore like zinc ore and others....no underground lake though ;D

Really, it just depends how much you need.  There's some gallium in every laser diode you have!  Not much, but some.

Oh, you want it pure?  Yeah, can't help you there.  There's always some around here, but it's not mine and it's WAY more expensive than what you'd be wanting to buy.  In my area, all the gallium comes in in gaseous form.  It's the other areas that have solid, such as the ultra-pure metal sources for molecular beam epitaxy.

Switch said:

[quote author=yobresal link=1225689611/0#4 date=1225729968]Jesus. $1299 for a Kilo. Can't I just go out and find a mine of this stuff somewhere, or an underground lake of it..... that would be nice. At $1299 a kilo I'd be rich.

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Yea but it's like 32 grams for 65 bucks, you can get that if you're just collecting.They say there are trace amounts of it in some ore like zinc ore and others....no underground lake though ;D[/quote]

Oh my goodness that is WAY cheaper than I've been able to find! That's only $2 per gram! (Still really expensive), but less than half of what I've been able to find before!

-Mark

yobresal said:

Yeah It sucks not having a job right now. I can't buy all the stuff I want anymore.
I used to have 6 lbs of pure sodium metal. That was lots of fun.
What are iridium's properties?

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I would really, really like 6 pounds of pure sodium metal...

Iridium is very hard, very heavy (second heaviest element, and only less than osmium by microscopic amounts), very durable, and very expensive.

Also, if you (or anybody else) is into collecting or trading elements, you can try to set something up with me. I would be willing to sell/trade:

Interesting/somewhat rare:

-Antimony
-Tellurium
-Selenium
-Titanium
-Gadolinium
-Yttrium
-Tungsten
-Bismuth
-Molybdenum

Not too rare, but interesting forms:

-Lead
-Sulfur
-Tin
-Copper
-Carbon
-Magnesium


--Mark

P.S. Sorry for the double post.  

I don't collect metals/elements, but I've encountered many good ones in my career thus far.  Sounds like you have a very nice collection going there.

For some of my cooler experiences, I've held a disk of platinum that was over 12 inches in diameter and 1/2 inches thick in my hands.  Also extremely high purity, so I was quoted at the time that it was worth roughly half a million US dollars, probably more now with commodity prices (haven't kept up, but most have gone up, so I assume platinum has as well).  That one was too heavy to try and run with, and it's really hard to run in cleanroom garments anyway.  I've also held a roughly 6 inch diameter disk of ruthenium, quoted as being worth about $30,000 at that time.  As far as shear mass, I've held pieces of germanium, titanium, silicon, tungsten, and tungsten silicide, all roughly the same size as the aforementioned hunk of platinum, but a little thicker.  

I still shake a little bit when I think about holding that piece of platinum worth more than my life.  I gave it back to my manager pretty much as quickly as I could.

pullbangdead said:

I don't collect metals/elements, but I've encountered many good ones in my career thus far.  Sounds like you have a very nice collection going there.

For some of my cooler experiences, I've held a disk of platinum that was over 12 inches in diameter and 1/2 inches thick in my hands.  Also extremely high purity, so I was quoted at the time that it was worth roughly half a million US dollars, probably more now with commodity prices (haven't kept up, but most have gone up, so I assume platinum has as well).  That one was too heavy to try and run with, and it's really hard to run in cleanroom garments anyway.  I've also held a roughly 6 inch diameter disk of ruthenium, quoted as being worth about $30,000 at that time.  As far as shear mass, I've held pieces of germanium, titanium, silicon, tungsten, and tungsten silicide, all roughly the same size as the aforementioned hunk of platinum, but a little thicker.  

I still shake a little bit when I think about holding that piece of platinum worth more than my life.  I gave it back to my manager pretty much as quickly as I could.

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Oh my goodness...what do you do for a job? That sounds so cool! And how did you manage to pick up the tungsten? It must have been so heavy!

-Mark

rocketparrotlet said:

[quote author=pullbangdead link=1225689611/0#9 date=1225767009]I don't collect metals/elements, but I've encountered many good ones in my career thus far.  Sounds like you have a very nice collection going there.

For some of my cooler experiences, I've held a disk of platinum that was over 12 inches in diameter and 1/2 inches thick in my hands.  Also extremely high purity, so I was quoted at the time that it was worth roughly half a million US dollars, probably more now with commodity prices (haven't kept up, but most have gone up, so I assume platinum has as well).  That one was too heavy to try and run with, and it's really hard to run in cleanroom garments anyway.  I've also held a roughly 6 inch diameter disk of ruthenium, quoted as being worth about $30,000 at that time.  As far as shear mass, I've held pieces of germanium, titanium, silicon, tungsten, and tungsten silicide, all roughly the same size as the aforementioned hunk of platinum, but a little thicker.  

I still shake a little bit when I think about holding that piece of platinum worth more than my life.  I gave it back to my manager pretty much as quickly as I could.

Click to expand...

Oh my goodness...what do you do for a job?  That sounds so cool!  And how did you manage to pick up the tungsten?  It must have been so heavy!

-Mark[/quote]

Sounds like he does something in thin film coatings technology as that was probably a Huge PT target.
I have also held a large hunk of platinum (12" x 4" x 1/2") when I was building and maintaining sputter systems. Clean rooms always seem to make expensive things a little more shiny

^Very good!  Yep, they were all sputter targets for 12inch silicon wafers.  That was all during an internship where I was working in PVD (physical vapor deposition)/thin film process development for a large semiconductor company.  One heck of an experience.  If anyone ever gets the chance to see an industrial production fab, especially a 12inch wafer fab, don't pass it up.  It will blow your mind.  The shear scale, price of equipment, everything, is just outrageous.  One of my jobs during the summer was to learn how to use a new tool in the fab, and then teach my manager how to use it.  This tool was about the 4th of its kind in the world, retailed for about $15million, and I had to teach my boss how to run the thing, crazy stuff.  And yes, everything is much more shiny when around such expensive stuff and in cleanrooms.

As far as being able to pick them up rocket, we had multiple people around when needed to move farther than a few feet and they had cranes/gantries for moving the heaviest ones longer distances.  The heaviest target was actually the silicon target, just because the design of the chamber required it to have a HUGE copper backing plate, that one was basically impossible for one person to actually move by themselves more than a foot or so, but I did manage to get it from one box into another when it was going into storage and another was being put in the chamber.  While I was there, one of the maintenance engineers did actually drop a germanium target.  It shattered, a cool $10grand gone in an instant.  

I could talk all day about that experience with the fab, the equipment, all the amazing stuff, but I've hijacked the thread long enough I reckon.