Tony, Merla's hand barbell weights were inherited from the desk of a deceased professor at MIT. They're the same size and shape as fuel rods. I did some very careful testing to determine that one was sintered tungsten bar stock as it comes from the press and the other a tungsten bar machined from the rough billet. You don't want to drop them on your foot. They tend to make a hole on the concrete floor.
Metallugical ignorance is widestread, even amount people in the engineering business. I identified the billet by the density, the extreme hardness and the mold marks from the sintering process. The only thing that will touch it is diamond and carburundom. It helped to have an old design and materials handbook at hand. I've yet to find anybody whom I have put to the test around here who can identify these bars in hand without running metallurgical tests on them, even dealers in nonferrous metals. I'm sure there's somebody, but I haven't run into them. Herb I (Merla) wonder how many people would recognize a nuclear symbol now. They were very visible during the height of the anti-nuclear movement. But you'd think everyone in the scrap metal business would know it, that it would be part of the training for the job. Anthony Nelson-Smith wrote: > Jane - I'm sure that the suspicions reported are well-founded, but > radioactive releases can sometimes be due to plain ignorant stupidity - as > in London some years ago, when a radio-source used in some sort of checking > on a demolition site was taken away by the scrap merchant commissioned to > clear the site of waste metal. The source was kept in a lead castle in a > pit railed off and marked with the standard danger signs. The lead castle > was recovered from the scrap-yard only minutes before a worker there was > about to break it open. The man clearing the site claimed, apparently in > all honesty, that he had no idea what the radioactive danger sign meant and > that he'd been told he could take all the metal left there. Tony > N-S.
