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-----Dad's old copper plating stuff
Q. Can someone please help me here. I found my dad's old copper plating stuff, I think he used it for baby shoes or other things. There is a large homemade power supply box with a couple of knobs on it and a gauge, and power leads.
There is also a plastic tub of blue crystals, a large chunk of what appears to be copper, and liquid in the bottom of the crystals. The liquid smells acidic, something like the way I remember film processing, or x-ray developing at the doctor's office smelled.
I used a steel screw driver to dig out the chunk of copper that was in the blue crystals, and I noticed that the screw driver got copper plating on it. My concern here is the liquid in the crystals. I need to know what it might be. I think my dad bought a kit from Popular Mechanic's or somewhere like it back in the 1960's. If someone could please help me out here that would be good.
mechanic, fabricator - Damascus, Oregon, USA
February 27, 2011
A. Hi, Darrel
The box with the knobs will be a power supply or "rectifier". The crystals are copper sulphate hexahydrate
⇦ on
eBay or
Amazon [affil link] , maybe with some additional sulfuric acid mixed in.
I would take the bucket to your county's hazardous waste collection event or facility. But it is not inconceivable to simply add a bit at a time to your drains as root killer, because that's basically what it probably is.
Regards,
Ted Mooney, P.E.
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