Identifying sodium filled valves?

[Larry C Leung]

All kidding and fireworks aside, I would imagine that Na filled valves
would be less dense than standard steel ones. Mass then, dump them in
water and measure the volume of the water displaced. M/V = D.

LL - NY

On Tue, 16 Oct 2001 11:00:42 -0400 Brett Dikeman <brett at cloud9.net>
writes:
>At 10:02 AM +0200 10/16/01, quattro at isham-research.com wrote:
>
>>The book says to cut the stem in half and drop them in a bucket of 
>water.
>
>And...step...back...
>
>:-)
>
>BTW, use a lot of water, not a little.  Why?  The heat generated from 
>
>the reaction is sometimes enough to ignite the hydrogen produced when 
>
>it reacts with the water.  Kaboom.  This mostly a problem where you 
>drop a piece of sodium into a small amount of water and the sodium 
>heats up.
>
>   In any case, do it in a well ventilated area, and don't smoke while 
>
>staring over the bucket watching the bubbles(for some reason, metal 
>image of Huw comes to mind here, peering over the bucket, cigarette 
>dangling from his mouth :-)
>
>   Learned this little lesson about sodium from a high school chem 
>professor who was incredibly nervous about just about 
>everything(wrong idea when you're a high school chem teacher) and 
>-very- scatterbrained.  She once put several ice cubes in her lab 
>coat pocket, and forgot about them.
>
>She remembered them about 3/4 of the way into the second period of 
>the lab(well over an hour later.)
>
>She's also the one who screwed up the concentration for the 
>contact-sensitive chemical she helped one class make(and coat on 
>paper sheets on the floor) for a practical joke on the next class. 
>The marks were clearly visible on the floor and she always winced 
>when asked how they got there.
>
>B
>--