Posted 08 October 2006 - 09:52 AM
Mephisto, you'll need nearly 5kg of CuSO4 to produce 1kg of Cu. This is if you don't have anhydrous and must use the pentahydrate. 1 mol of CuSO4*5H2O would be 249.62g, then to use a little excess (better this than Zn) you go up to 324.5g, or so I think.
You should get a fine percipitate no matter what size Zn you use. What will change is the time it takes for the reaction to finish.
I went ahead and tried this out. First, I made a nice solution with roughly 1L of water, and 102g of CuSO4*5H2O. I then proceded to stir in 20.5g of Zn dust. The solution turned black at this point. I let it sit for ten minutes, then gave it another good stir. I scraped my stirring device along the bottom of the reation vessle (fork in pickle jar) to bring up a brownish muck. Everything was left for about an hour to finish off. I proceded to filter out the percipitate using 3 coffee filters, saving the filtrate to make sure most of the Cu had been filtered out. When it had been, you cold see a bit still in the filtrate, though, not enough to worry over. I scraped as much off of the filter as I could, but possibly a gram remained stuck in the filter. I put the brownish red muck in the oven too dry for 2 hours. Once dry, I powdered and weighed it, finding 14g of Cu dust.
Now, I mixed everything up, using all of the Cu. My AP is 200 micron, so it could still be seen in the mix. I burt about half a gram, greeted by a pale blue flame, though the flame was rather large. I was only 5 or so feet away, which could explain the lack of the coplight color.
After this, I added 9 grams of R45-M, or about 9.5%. Yes this is freakishly high, but it really isn't too much by volume. To this, 4.5 grams of curative was added to give a very hard cure.
While still gooey, I burnt a drop of it. The blue now was deeper, and it burnt much slower than before.
Now, 12 hours later, the block that I formed it in is overall cured. I'm going to make some cut stars out of it, and hopefully test it in a mine or shell. So far it looks very promising.
Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There lies they and here lies we, under the spreading chestnut tree.