30 May
2007
30 May
'07
9:34 p.m.
Chris M wrote:
Gas burns much hotter...unless you're talking
about
*real* charcoal made from hardwoods. But you know
what...gas still burns much hotter.
Yep! Hydrogen ... but you don't burn it - it
was a plasma arc of some kind. I remember
reading about in Scientific American 1961 I think.
My point was you
could mess w/hydrochloric? acid and all that
(wherever
you'd find it - I know someone's going to point out
how it could be commonly had, or maybe it's a
relatively *common* thing to find)...or you could just
burn off all the volatile gunk in a cheap furnace. But
you'd have some steel (pins) left over. That'll melt
too...at oh about 2800 degress Fahrenheit. Can't
remember if gold melts at a higher or lower
temperature. But at least you should be able to
separate the gold from the steel. Or come to think of
it maybe you could eliminate the steel before the
barbecue.
Well you have the Copper Age, Bronze Age then the Iron age.
Gold was way back there in the copper age.
I'm not aware of a resistance element that'll
go any
higher then ~2300 degrees, that being enough to melt
brass or prolly even pure copper. But the mints use
magnetic induction (with some sort of coil thingee).
But that requires and awful lot of juice I'm told.
Like enough to light a city block...
We have VINTAGE VALVE computers that do that already :)