[chemicalLindsay]

Does anyone know any places in australia that sell good chemistry kits (not stupid lab slime ones or those goozes).I mean there are heaps of good ones on the net that are in america ,but my dad sais I shouldn't buy any because I don't know whether they will ever come.

   Also does anyone know where to get good electrodes for electrolysis and galvanic cells.
 
   Thanks!

[Mitch]

Believe it or not e-bay is typically a good way to get materials.

[jdurg]

E-Bay is a VERY good place to get stuff to soothe your curiosity.  Believe it or not, about 99% of my element collection came from E-Bay.  A good place to go to help you stock up on supplies is from the seller "lauram300."  They sell surplus chemicals of super high purity for very good costs.  I bought a pound of mercury from them for only about 10 bucks.  I even got some pure bromine liquid for a very cheap price.  

Speaking of mercury, I had a really fun time today cleaning my pound of mercury.  The mercury is stored in a plastic HDPE bottle which doesn't really keep out atmospheric air.  As a result, the mercury had oxidized to a blackish/green "gunk" which didn't look all too neat.  I had a spare borosilicate glass vial and some Teflon thread-seal tape, so I decided to clean some of the mercury and store it in the clear glass display vial.  In the past I've heard about how you can easily clean mercury by passing it through a coffee filter, but never got the chance to do it.  (Schools and Universities have suddenly become paranoid about mercury).  So I took a coffee filter and put a few small pin-holes in the bottom of it and put the holes over the opening to the vial.  I then poured the mercury in and it slowly dripped through turning super silvery bright.  The coffee-filter method of cleaning mercury works!  Sure I had a coffee filter full of extremely toxic mercury oxide, but that is easily disposed of.  I now have a small vial filled with super bright and clean mercury.  

[Donaldson Tan]

EBay ought to help support this website. We are doing it so much good advertisement. LOL/

[Corvettaholic]

You can legally possess mercury? I thought there was some kind of regulation on it?

[Mitch]

Well, I'm not one to keep the website down. I added the buy chemicals link to the top of the website. I get a huge $0.15 for every item someone bids on.  

[Corvettaholic]

I can legally buy mercury? Or some of the dangerous stuff? I like jdurg's idea of an element collection.

[jdurg]

The ONLY elements that are illegal to posses are the fully fissionable elements.  So things like plutonium and the transuranic elements are illegal to posses since there is no processing needed to convert them to fissionable materials.  Uranium is legal to posses since you have to go through quite a bit of work to make it fissionable.  Now with a lot of elements disposing of them is what is illegal.  I'm not breaking any laws by having a pound of mercury in my house.  If I went and dumped the mercury in my backyard or down the sink, then I'd be breaking numerous laws.  That's one part of an element collection that a lot of people sadly forget.  They'll go and get a bunch of stuff, then change their minds and just throw their elements in the trash.  Once you start a collection, you either will have to legally dispose of it (which will cost a LOT of money), or sell/donate it to someone else.  The possesion of the elements is perfectly legal, albiet a bit dangerous at times.  The one thing I will stress is that collecting the elements is NOT cheap and it can be quite dangerous.  (Your coin collection won't explode in your face or start a fire.  Your element collection can do that if you don't know what you're doing).  Remember, more does not always equal better.  My first article that I wrote goes over a lot of this stuff, and I try to reiterate the warnings about the dangerous elements in the subsequent articles I have written.  (I really should have expanded upon the dangers of phosphorus is my most recent article, but I hit a MAJOR bout of writer's block).  

[Corvettaholic]

The one danger on phosphorus that I was looking for was all the stuff about white phosphorus in vietnam and such. For those who watched "We Were Soldiers", one of the poor guys gets hit with one, and my grandpa told me stories of the stuff. I remember reading your article on collecting elements, and it does sound pricey. I thought of a neat idea of collecting spiffy compounds. It'd take lifetimes to collect every imaginable compound, but I think it'd be cool just to hang on to the ones that are "neat".

[hmx9123]

You may also want to note that some government agencies (DEA, BATFE) keep track of people who buy certain things, like red phosphorous, which is used somehow in drug manufacture.

[jdurg]

You may also want to note that some government agencies (DEA, BATFE) keep track of people who buy certain things, like red phosphorous, which is used somehow in drug manufacture.

Yup.  But if you are doing nothing illegal then you have nothing to worry about.  If the DEA wants, they can come to my house and look at everything I've got.  Nothing will get me in any type of trouble.  (Now if this were quite a few years ago, then yeah, it wouldn't be such a good thing to have the DEA around.  )  

Back in the Vietnam War the Viet-Cong were known to have used white phosphorus grenades.  They are basically just a normal explosive grenade, but they are filled with white phosphorus so it will rain fire on anything it touches.  If this got on your skin, you'd have to immediately get under water and physically cut the flesh away that was touched by the phosphorus.  The stuff is unimaginably horrific, and getting some on your flesh is not too great of an idea.  That is why mine is heavily sealed and will never, ever, ever be opened.

As for the expense of collecting elements, well, that's just something that has to be dealt with.    The one thing you can be happy about is that you don't have to worry about more elements being discovered for you to collect.  If your goal is to collect all stable elements, then you will have a stopping point you can reach and say that your collection is "complete."  (Even if you collect some of the radioactive ones, the great majority of them have half-lives so vanishingly small that there's no way to collect them anyhow).  With an element collection the only thing you have to fight is your cravings for higher quality, and higher mass samples.  I'm constantly looking to upgrade samples I have and either trade away the older samples, or sell them back on E-Bay.  I would still like to get better/more samples of osmium, iridium, europium, strontium and cobalt for example, but I need to wait until the time and price are right.  

[hmx9123]

If the DEA looks around your house, you are probably OK.  If the ATF comes around, you might have problems.  Are your reactive/explosive/flammable materials stored in proper explosives magazines?  I doubt it.  I'm not saying the ATF gives half a crap about someone's element collection, but if they came in on something unrelated, they could throw the book at you.

[jdurg]

Everything I have that could potentially go "boom" is in a small quantity which poses more of a fire-hazard than an explosion hazard.  Sure if water flooded all of my alkali metals there would be a problem, but it would still not cause a violent explosion.  Elements which need to be isolated have been isolated, and a fire safe stores all the "really" dangerous stuff.  But again, the quantities are large enough to see the bulk properties of the element, but small enough to not pose a major problem.  (I don't have a three pound chunk of sodium like Theodore Gray has/had).

[chemicalLindsay]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but hello (not in a rude way) I live in australia and due to our stingy laws chemicals from overseas (america) aren't generally able to be imported even ones by lauram300 who only ships to america and canada.....And the politicians wonder why heaps of people in our country aren't that enthused about science (gu hu).thanks anyway.

[hmx9123]

Didn't you just recently have swords outlawed there?  I read something about that...