Material Gloat

george wilson said:
Personally,I'd stay away from messing with the beryllium. You may not really know the alloy. It just isn't worth the risk of messing with in my opinion.

I heard about a guy who discovered his junkyard steel was quite radioactive back in the 80's. I borrowed a geiger counter and made sure mine was o.k.. With the shipyards around here working on nuclear powered ships,you just don't know what might accidentally make its way into a junkyard. The same is true of any metal that you don't have exact data on. Be careful.
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Several years ago I was at our local scrap yard in town and I noticed that a train car load of scrap metal was backed into the yard & the machine operator was unloading the train car & carefully placing the metal in a special area. I thought this was strange but I went about my way. A couple of days later I went back to the yard & saw a man there with a tester checking for some radioactive scrap. Come to find out, the owner of the yard had sent a train car load out of state & when it got to it's destination the whole load was rejected. The yard owner had to pay for the train car to be brought back to Murfreesboro, pay his operator to unload it & have the metal tested. What they found from what I understand was some pipe that had some small traces of radioactive material in it. It wasn't much but it was enough to have the whole load rejected. Soon after this the owner of the yard had a high dollar system installed at the entrance to the drive on scale to detect any contaminated steel before it gets into his yard. Definitely something to think about.
Phil
 
Tony Wells said:
That's what made me wonder about the wedge. Is it like wood splitting wedge? Are there any part numbers on it? I kind of have a fascination about BeCu tools.
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Its not a wood splitting wedge its only about 3/8 or maybe 1/2 on the large end. It also has scratches on it that wood wouldn't do. And on the drive end it has a lot of places were it is chipped off from being hit with something hard.

Paul
 
For many,many years,I have had 1/2 of a crow bar(more correctly a wrecking bar) of the ordinary type made of Bu. Someone sawed it in half and I have the half. I've never made anything out of it,though years ago I did not know about the health issues.
 
When I worked in power stations some of the generators were filled with hydrogen for insulation. During overhauls they would be purged but we still had to use non sparking tools when we were inside, in case of any remaining traces. The company had a big set of Be Cu spanners and hammers for this work. I dont recall seeing any wedges but I am sure someone might have a need for one in an explosive enviroment.
As an aside, clearance divers used to be issued with Be Cu knives for work in proximity to magnetic mines.

Cheers Phil
 
Back in the mid 1980's I also worked in a power station in the turbine dept. We didn't have to use Beryllium tools when working on a generator outage but for a while I was the "Hydrogen Plant Fitter". The station had its own Hyrogen producing plant (electrolysis of water - electricity was cheap. lol) so non sparking tools were supposed to be used. Some "bright spark" (pun intended) in the engineering office bought a full set of Whitworth Beryllium copper tools at great cost. Too bad he didn't think to check what the bolts in the Hyrogen plant were. Mostly metric with a few AF scattered around to add a bit of variety.
As a result the only non sparking spanners we could use were the shifters (adjustable wrenchs for our American cousins.) The plant was very well ventilated and we took a lot of care not to make any sparks whilst using our std steel spanners.
Incidentally, I'm not sure about the insulating qualities of the hydrogen, but on the units where I was, the hydrogen was used mainly for cooling the generators. I remember one of the units had a big problem with the hydrogen seals leaking for some reason for a while.
bollie7
 
I was talking to a buddy that worked in the Pantex Ordnance Plant in Amarillo and that BU Wedge could have been used in an Ordnance plant to Pack Munitions
 
Actually bollie I think you are correct.
Clearing a few cobwebs, makes me think that the H was used for cooling and not insulation,.... too much grog :nuts:
That was at Yallourn W station.

Cheers Phil
 
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