[meteorite-list] Reverse Electrolysis

From: Greg Hupe <gmhupe_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:29:16 -0400
Message-ID: <3271140BA615435D92F52BB4910C2A5E_at_Gregor>

Hi Mike,

The process you have performed is called "Reverse Electrolysis". It is
typically used to conserve iron or other metallic objects by removing salts
or other corrosive elements that have penetrated the object. It is most
commonly used to conserve iron shipwreck objects found in salt water.

Best regards,
Greg

====================
Greg Hupe
The Hupe Collection
NaturesVault (eBay)
gmhupe at htn.net
www.LunarRock.com
IMCA 3163
====================
Click here for my current eBay auctions:
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZnaturesvault



----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Murray" <mmurray at montrose.net>
To: <countdeiro at earthlink.net>
Cc: "Meteorite-list" <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2009 8:46 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Flow lines on the INSIDE! Not. (cleaning
ironsfollow-up)


> Hi All,
> I put my little suspect iron in a solution of water and calcium
> carbonate. I actually wrapped it loosely with tinfoil and sat that down
> in the mixture. I got out my trusty battery charger and connected the
> red lead to a sacrificial piece of junk strap metal and sat that down
> along one side of the plastic bowl. I connected the black lead to the
> tinfoil. Actually clamping it against the side of the bowl same as I did
> the piece of strap on the other side of the bowl. Anyway, I poured in a
> couple teaspoons cleanser and swished it around with a plastic spoon so
> it was dissolved good. Plugged in the charger and watched as a steady
> stream of bubbles headed from the tinfoil towards the sacrificial anode
> strap. After about two hours of cooking, I can now see what I have. A
> really sculptured, bright chrome something that is as hard or harder than
> tool steel (don't ask how I know that last bit) and shaped like a
> stretched out version of Willamette. I did a nickel test and think now
> with all I see that it might need to go to someone to get checked further
> if I want to know for sure. Anyway, the process worked better than I was
> expecting. Doesn't seem to be dangerous to do. I put the charger on
> 12V, 6 amp scale. I left the solution outside when it was cooking. I
> treated my specimen to a bath in penetrating oil when I had finished
> cleaning it. One more interesting tidbit, looks like after the red rust
> was removed, left on the suspect rock is a very thin black coating in
> quite a few places, mostly in the low spots. If that is magnetite then I
> answered my own question, no, the process doesn't remove the oxide, only
> the red rust. My little experiment worked well enough for my purposes,
> but hopefully no one with a stone of any value will follow my lead. I
> would hate to think I inspired someone to ruin a valuable specimen.
>
> Mike in CO
>
>
>
> On Sep 28, 2009, at 1:52 PM, countdeiro at earthlink.net wrote:
>
>> Hi Jason, Piper, Mike and List,
>>
>> Gathering my tattered cloak up to cover myself, I must say that even I,
>> with less than a year in the game, wouldn't be so ignorant as to say I
>> saw flow lines on the INSIDE of a specimen. What I said.. and did see..
>> were..and I will be a bit more descriptive here...nearly parallel, but
>> sinuous, thin, rounded, iron lines orientated in one direction on the
>> outside surface of a formerly concreted and rusted Nantan that I had
>> blasted the crap out of and wirebrushed. It looks lovely. Maybe I should
>> put it eBay and call it a 100% crusted and oriented individual...:o}
>>
>> Guido
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Jason Utas <meteoritekid at gmail.com>
>>> Sent: Sep 28, 2009 4:45 AM
>>> To: Meteorite-list <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] "flow lines" on weathered irons (was
>>> "question on cleaning irons")
>>>
>>> Hello Piper,
>>> Of course - hence the differential weathering rates of Campos ("old"
>>> versus "new"), to name one of many examples.
>>> Perhaps the best example of such weathering can be seen on irons from
>>> Gibeon. I unfortunately don't have a copy of Buchwald here, but if
>>> anyone does have access to the second volume, if they could flip
>>> through the Gibeon section, they would find a photograph of a
>>> beautiful mass of Gibeon (I forget the name of the mass) on display in
>>> a museum in Germany. It displays beautiful fusion crust and
>>> smooth-edged, shallow regmaglypts - it looks as fresh as many Sikhotes
>>> on the market today. Compare it to many of the larger Gibeons on ebay
>>> today and you'll see little-to-no resemblance. If anyone out there
>>> can scan a picture of said page, I'd be much obliged. It really is a
>>> good example.
>>> There are, however, a few common irons which I would never expect to
>>> have fusion crust: Canyon Diablo, Toluca, Odessa, and Nantan, to name
>>> a few. I've seen hundreds, if not thousands of examples of each, and
>>> I have never seen a single one of any of them that came close to being
>>> "fresh" enough to retain a trace of fusion crust.
>>> Nantan is one of the most corroded and least stable iron meteorites I
>>> have ever known, though Dronino's turning out to be about as bad.
>>> People need to learn more in order to clear up the misconception that
>>> all meteorites show signs of a hot, violent entry through the
>>> atmosphere; I see NWA's on ebay all the time that are nothing but old
>>> weathered fragments coated with desert varnish. Check out this
>>> seller:
>>>
>>> http://myworld.ebay.com/eegooblago/
>>>
>>> Almost all of his stones are covered in a 'glossy fusion crust.' Oh
>>> wait - those are just desert varnished fragments that have been
>>> weathered to hell. Most of the melt features the seller notes are due
>>> to sandblasting and corrosion, and s/he goes so far as to say that the
>>> cracks in his stones formed when they hit the ground! Anyone remotely
>>> familiar with meteorites and weathering processes knows that over
>>> thousands of years, meteorites fracture and break apart, in a manner
>>> completely unrelated to their having impacted the Earth.
>>> This seems like a very similar misconception; Guido even notes finding
>>> flow lines on the inside of the meteorite, having broken it open.
>>> There's no way there would have been any flow lines on the surface of
>>> the iron, never mind the inside of it. It simply isn't possible.
>>> Regards,
>>> Jason
>>>
>>> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 12:47 AM, Piper R.W. Hollier <piper at xs4all.nl>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Hi Guido, Jason, Mike, and list,
>>>>
>>>> At 22:33 27-09-09, Jason wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Regardless of how well you cleaned your Nantan, whatever you found
>>>>> under the surface was not flow lines.
>>>>
>>>> It appears that the layers of taenite and kamacite do not always
>>>> oxidize at
>>>> the same rate at the surface of a buried iron. This would make sense
>>>> intuitively, since the proportion of nickel is different. Just as
>>>> nitol has
>>>> a differential effect on taenite and kamacite in the lab, some
>>>> conditions of
>>>> soil chemistry might produce an analogous result in the strewn field,
>>>> albeit
>>>> much more slowly. What is sometimes left after a long period of
>>>> weathering
>>>> is a pattern of parallel grooves on the outer surface that might be
>>>> (mis)interpreted as flow lines.
>>>>
>>>> This is an effect that I first noticed on a thick slice of Toluca from
>>>> Alain
>>>> Carion's collection that was on display at a wonderful exhibition at
>>>> the
>>>> Ecole des Mines in Paris in 1998. The correspondence between the
>>>> shallow
>>>> ridges on the oxidized edge of the slice and the Widmanstaetten
>>>> pattern of
>>>> the cut surface was rather obvious.
>>>>
>>>> There might be something about the specific soil chemistry at the site
>>>> that
>>>> could make this effect more pronounced at some localities (e.g. Nantan
>>>> or
>>>> Toluca) by enhancing the difference in oxidation rate.
>>>>
>>>> Piper
>>>>
>>>> ______________________________________________
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Received on Mon 28 Sep 2009 09:29:16 PM PDT