Sparkium
Somewhere in the world is a factory turning out ingots of mischmetal. They all look like this, one will cost you $US30 to $US50 (I paid $US31 plus delivery for mine from here, but they don’t seem to have any at the moment; those international terrorists at United Nuclear have them, of course), and they’re a lot of fun.
Mischmetal is a mixture of rare earth elements which, when iron and magnesium are added to the mix, is used to make lighter “flints”. It’s highly pyrophoric; small slivers of it burn spontaneously in air.
The added iron makes the mixture strong enough that a little peg of it won’t squish or come to bits when the hard steel striker wheel in a cigarette lighter scrapes over it; that same mixture is used in a larger scale in the Ultimate Survival BlastMatch. But a chunky one pound ingot of straight mischmetal is also a fine spark source.
It doesn’t spark incredibly well when you scrape it the first few times (with, in this case, a little knife blade), but once you shave off the oxide layer, away it goes.
The spectator is the same one who features in the second picture here.
If your cats would ever try to tell other cats about their daily life, they would never believe them…
Comment by Itsacon — November 21, 2006 @ 1:27 am
I like that the cat decides it’s nothing to be worried about after a few seconds, and gets on with things.
Comment by rsynnott — November 21, 2006 @ 1:28 pm
lol … I was looking for a cat in the *second* picture on this page http://www.dansdata.com/quickshot031.htm … I thought ‘Crikey, Dan must have good eyesight’ !
Wrong second picture :roll:
A
Comment by Andy — November 21, 2006 @ 9:22 pm
Yeah, I guess that technically you just might if you were a huge nitpicker observe that it actually is the third picture… :-)
Comment by Daniel Rutter — November 22, 2006 @ 1:14 am