What not to do

When you get a nice expensive gold ring they should give you a manual with it. Well maybe people like Tom and I anyway..

Heres something interesting I learned about mercury this weekend:

"Its ease in amalgamating with metals is made use of in extracting gold, silver, and platinum from their ores."

Aka; mercury sticks to gold. I have a gold ring on my finger, as of late. These two things do not go so well when my life long dream of playing with mercury comes true. But let me tell you, it was totally worth all the poisoning and ring ruining I am now experiencing! It was SO cool!

So the story goes; I was playing with the mercury. It's really fun to pour. From my hand to the jar, from the jar to my hand. After we are done playing with the mercury we wash our hands really well, and as I'm washing my hands I look at my nice shiny ring and say to Courtney, "weird, the light in this house totally makes my ring look silver rather than gold! What the heck?!" I go around the house to all different lights and it always looks silver! I take it off and am holding it at different angles, still looks silver. Then I realize it feels funny too, it's all slippery...What is going on. I suddenly realize. If I run my fingernail along the metal of my ring I can see the thin layer of liquid metal slightly move. SHITE! How on earth do you get it off? I know! Mercury is heavy, if I put my ring in some water it will sink in the water thus leaving my ring unharmed. Yeah, that doesn't work for future reference. So next step, Thomas starts looking on his crackberry on how to fix this whole situation. We find a website that gives us instructions as follows;

You will need:

A lighter

A coat hanger

Some polish/toothpaste

gloves and goggles

Hold the ring with a piece of coat hanger and hold the blue part of the flame up to it. The heat will boil off the mercury. Try not to breath when you are are burning your ring, and it says it won't take long. Then to clean it rub it with toothpaste.

Great, here we are two weeks after I get this nice shiny ring holding it up to a lighter for half an hour, tarnishing the crap out of it, and hopefully not damaging it!

The short of the story is it mostly worked! Though the jewellers were not very impressed with what I had done, and not very appreciative of how well we had cleaned it ourselves! Ha ha, well I think it makes a good story anyway, who else can say that's happened to them two weeks after they got their ring!