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In Reply to: Re: So, today I.m given a Keith Monks Laboratory Pickup Arm. What to do?...PIC posted by mosin on May 12, 2007 at 19:42:20:
...MadHatter!There is one small drawback to open mercury baths - the fumes do bad things to your brain (over time, of course). Maybe you could use it until you start hearing homicidal voices in your head and then sell it to the next guy?
Follow Ups:
You just need to get the EPA to declare your house a superfund site and they'll hand you tens of millions to clean up the place. You just sell the arm and pocket the change :P
...the key to using such devices would be to not stand too close to them. I imagine that once the tonearm is mounted that the risk would be minimal, however. Nonetheless, mercury can be bad news in the wrong environment.
Well if you do use the mercury fill, I suppose the EPA will do a mighty good job of cleaning up in your room, at least once they find out about it. I would pass on the use of such an arm, although I always wanted one for curiosities sake and I do happen to have a pound of mercury....You wouldn't want the mercury vapors created in a warm environment.
It occurred to me that it might be possible to "lock in" the mercury by adding a layer of some other fluid on top, like silicone oil, in such a fashion that the mercury would still be able to make contact, so that it could serve its intended purpose. That way, the fumes would be held captive, assuming the arm's contacts continued to remain in the mercury bath.
Although your idea of topping the mercury with something like oil might work to keep the fumes in, it would also render the arm useless.After the wells are filled with mercury, the arm wand is placed on top of the upward facing male pivot. The wand portion of the arm has four pins which are submerged into the four mercury baths. If the mercury had any type of oil floating on top, the moment you placed the wand in place, the pins would become coated with oil as they passed through it and would no longer conduct a signal.
I used to own one of these arms. Even the oxidation "scum" which formed on the surface of the mercury would eventually cause a loss of signal from one channel or the other. Cleaning would always restore the signal, but it was a pain, not to mention the health concerns.
to keep the mercury from oxidizing. Mercury used to be used in some aplications as a mirror but had to be covered for long term use.
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