"gotta a liquid mercury roll bar in the trunk"

Add me to the list of kids who played with mercury in 8th grade science class. We rolled it around our desks with our bare hands whenever we were bored. This would have been about 1972.

 

Never heard of one before, but it could be part of the lyrics to a late 50s-early 60s car song.

 

There is two kinds of mercury. The old style is the good stuff that can be used for getting gold out of stuff. It is really dangerous if ingested or introduced to a water supply. The newer stuff that is in thermometers is more dangerous if inhaled, it evaporates i guess. But supposedly is safer or less toxic if ingested or disposed of improperly. When useing the old stuff for gold you use the mercury to pull the gold out of dirt or sand i guess. then you boil off the mercury. That puts it in the atmosphere then into the rain. I have a little jar of the old stuff i got at a garage sale for a dollar but at the price stated earlier i might have to sell it.

 

Mercury may be the most toxic element of all. It has the ability to cross the blood/brain barrier. It messes up your brain. Mercury poisoning has destroyed my life. The list of symptoms is almost endless. All bad. Sometimes I don't leave the house for weeks except for church. I can't bring myself to do things that I really want to do. Pain,unable to concentrate,blurred vision,extreme fatigue.I have to take 5 different sleep meds to be able to sleep. I cannot sleep without meds. Ever.
Pops has it right,mercury is absorbed as a vapor through your lungs.It doesn't take much heat to vaporize it. It is probably impossible to ever remove all of it from your body. I have been suffering with it for ten years or more.
It is sinister stuff don't play with it.
Probably most people aren't affected by it but the ones that are live a terrible life. I probably was poisoned by my alalgam fillings. I have a friend that was poisoned by eating a can of tunafish every workday. It would be a real tragedy to be poisoned by something that you were just curious about or thought it was fun to play with. Some folks get poisoned without ever knowing what happened. For instance, the janitor that is vacuuming the floor where mercury from a thermometer or blood pressure machine had been released from a breakage. Invisible on the flooring or carpet. Anybody that works in a dentist office in any capacity. Even after hours cleaning the rooms. Flourescent bulbs have a drop of mercury in them. Perhaps disposing of those contributed to my poisoning. I always broke them to get them in the trash. Now the trash collecters don't take them. They just leave them and take everything else in the can.
This has strayed a good bit from the original post, but needed to be said.

 

Somehow I thought a "liquid mercury roll bar in the trunk" was the same as having your temperature taken from the backside.

 

One time I caught a lot of fish, and I put them in the trunk of my mercury. I got questioned by the local fish and game officer, he said I had a lot of fish in my mercury.

Thank you very little.

 

And the current government is outlawing incandescent lights, replace with the curly cfls that contain merc. After reading that the house should be evaquated if one is broken, due to the mercury vapors in them, I quit buying them. I am sure this info is still available. Calif has outlawed incandescent and no more can be stocked for sale after the inventory is depleated. ALL the curly CFLs are made in China. As soon as the USA is outfitted with CFLs and China has made their profit and poisioned us, they are going to change to LEDs. I bought a case of 100 watt incandescents. They are going to phase out from high wattage down until all are gone in the rest of the country.

 

I'm with you, especially with mercury being a symbol of speed. Sounds more like mercurial marketing to me than any actual gigantic tube of mercury encased in lead or steel...

 

Wear your tin hat much?
I also played with mercury in jr. high school. One of our favorite tricks was to coat a silver quarter with it then lay it on the stainless steel countertop in the lunchroom for the cashier to try to pick up. Fun stuff to play with, and it didn't affect me me me me me.

Mercury is mercury. There isn't "old style" or "new style" It's still a poisonous heavy metal, liquid at room temperature. It also evaporates at room temperature, so if you have some around, keep it well sealed.

Florescent light bulbs have such a small amount of mercury in them that the EPA allows them to be disposed of in a normal landfill. Incandescent bulbs aren't made in the USA any more because China makes them too cheaply for us to compete. LED's run cheaper and are more efficient than even florescents, but cost more to make. They last longer, too.
So pay our money and take your choice.

 

i like a lot of us played with this stuff in the '50's as my older Brother was into radios and use to have a quart jar of the stuff he had gotten out of radio parts. Don't know what ever happen to his stash but he had 7 ohnery kids so they probably fed it to the neighbor kids. Had a friend try to buy some for race car ballast but it was too expencsve for him even back then

 

There are many different mercury compounds. Besides that, there is elemental mercury, which is the shiny liquid metal people think of when you say "mercury".

Yes, it evaporates. Yes, it's toxic. No, it's not instant death for all within a 100-mile radius.

As many people on here said, it was in common use for decades if not centuries.

Do handle it with care. Do give it to a lab or someplace that will use / dispose of it properly.

...

We don't know if there is any mercury actually in the device in question. I guess it should be treated with care until that is figured out.

...

Funny thing about the incandescent bulbs ... As far as I know, GE was making incandescent bulbs right here in the USA ... until the Bush adminstration, after heavy lobbying from the makers of incandescent bulbs, agreed to implement a "soft ban" on incandescent bulbs through the use of "efficiency standards." Then, after the bulbs were effectively outlawed here in the USA, GE moved its incandescent plants to China.

http://consuljpmtl.org/ges-green-plans-move-jobs/

Interesting, huh? That the makers of incandescent light bulbs basically came up with the idea of banning them?

It seems to me that the main problem was that incandescent bulbs were too cheap ... the manufacturers didn't make enough profit from them. So for years they have been pushing consumers into CFLs, which can generate a lot more profit. And LEDs will drive even more profit.

If you think about it, how much labor really goes into an incandescent lightbulb? Those factories are so heavily automated that it doesn't really matter what country the factory is in ... wages will never be more than a small fraction of the cost of the item.

Now, the cost of electricity and the cost of complying with environmental regulations ... those might add up to a large fraction of the cost of the item. That's where China really had us beat ... if you call it a victory.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6211261.ece

I guess it makes sense to just ignore the health problems for the sake of the almighty dollar / yuan / yen / renminbi.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/world/asia/15lead.html

Sounds a lot like the disaster in Japan that a poster above mentioned, huh?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease

 

wow! I really thought the old dude was yanking my chain or just confused. sweet! thanks for the info, ya'll!

 

Had a 1960 phoenix 4 door x hi po car helped with sharp corners and sway at high speed looked like a short piece of pipe with legs bolted to trunk floor rite over rearend.

 

HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! STOP!!!!!! thats funny.

 

Years ago, an "older guy" (he'd be around 80 today) told me of a rod he built in the early '60s that had "a 40 pound gyro bar in the rear". Not long after that, I found an ad in a mid '50s HRM for a Gyro stabilizer that had the weight/balls/spring setup, but that one was filled with some sort of oil. I think that Hellwig sold them.

 

On a side note we use a lot of lead for the race cars and I know that guys would fasten an extra battery in the trunk for traction but we were told that lead will no longer be made available... not only as counter weight material but all wheel weights and anything else that uses exposed lead!

Wonder where this will end up... but everything in life has a calculated risk and it seems to me the most economical means happen to carry the greatest physical risk!

 

Mercury is the current bad boy on the chemical list, last time it was lead. Remember back 25 to 30 years, when they were going after paint and gasoline because they had lead in them? They removed the lead and the prices went up. Now paint has titanium dioxide and gas has ethyl alcohol, both cheaper than the lead, but the products cost more.

Back to the Mercury Sway Bar! I had one my uncle loaned to me. I had it mounted in the trunk of my 1963 Chevy II Nova. It didn't reduce the sway of that car one bit, so I removed it, and gave it back to my uncle. The unit was an aluminum box, about 8X12 inches by about 4 feet long, very heavy too. When you tipped the box, you would expect a weight transfer, but it didn't, it just had mass. I doubt it had any mercury in it...

I have worked with lead and elemental mercury since the 70's, I have seen the hype and hysteria over the dangers of them, and most of the regulations over the two is just knee jerk political response to a non-issue. Yes, they can be dangerous, and definitely kept out of the reach of children. HOWEVER, both are found in their natural state in the ground! There are places on this planet where you can dig and find these elements. That is correct, they are elements, part of the eco-system, a part of nature, a part of our environment... Just like oxygen and nitrogen we breath every day, and just like arsenic and cyanide, it is in the environment...

 

As some of the bro's said, I learn something new everyday here. God knows I need the knowledge. ~sololobo~

 

Sure it is in the environment, but you don't find refined pools of the shit in nature. The toxicity of Mercury is not to be dismissed and is not taken lightly by any health or safety organization. The physical side effects of human interaction are not dismissable either. The data exists to warrant that kind of concern.

 

Somebody went to a lot of trouble to engineer that thing but I'm wondering what for? There doesn't seem to be much horizontal travel for that weight to move. Maybe it was supposed to function as a horizontal shock absorber to reduce sway? Weird.

 

I am not dismissing the dangers, but some of the laws and regulations do little to protect the public (you and me), yet seem to protect industry from liability of their part in generating the pollution.

In nature, lead and mercury can be found in their natural state as well as mixed with other elements. Perhaps not in pools, but close to it!
Lead is often combined with silver, and because of our desire to have silver, we end up with a lot of refined lead. Mercury is amalgamated with many elements, gold, silver, aluminum, and that is how we end up with so much of that.

Mercury is most toxic when heated to vapor. At room temp, it is very inert.
However, man uses mercury in the vapor state usually, like cfls and voltage regulator tubes and such. If they break while heated, I would not want to be in the same room as those devises.

The biggest generator of mercury contamination in the environment is coal burning power plants. the burning of coal vaporises the mercury, and the vapor is blown by the wind in plumes over the countryside, if there are any towns or cities in the plume, you will find mercury poison cases galore, but no one seems willing to talk about that. Besides, the plants have smoke scrubbers now! wink wink, nudge nudge...

Also, refining other metals releases many tons of other hazardous materials we are affected by, industry is the large contributor but we get stuck with the results...

Too bad the EPA had their teeth extracted by past political marauders posing as government officials...

 

Check where that was made! Probably illegal there now!

 

Kinda reminds me of the Nike base I was stationed at:

"We didn't have any nukes".

 

I had a mecury Police intercepter once had the same no body roll at all

 

I have seen this type of weight transfer device in police cars from the 60s. Spring loaded cast iron or lead weights. The most mercury i have ever seen was found while panning for gold in the American River (if i remember right) within sight of downtown Sacramento. Didn't find much gold.... lots of little balls of Mercury. This was in 1987 or 88.

 

when I was a kid my dad would pour some mercury on the kitchen table for my brother and I to play with. split it in to smaller sections and roll it around with our fingers into bigger and bigger blobs. it was fun to watch the way it absorbs itself so quickly.
this before TV

 

We're never gonna know what it is till beaner reports in, come on beaner where are ya! Curious minds want to know.

 

They used a lot of Mg [magnesium] in race cars.

Mercury [Hg], was used more often to transfer weight from the front to the rear.

 

Years ago I bought a 70 gremlin from a lady,and it had one of those things bolted to the rear floor,she swore it really made a difference in the handling of the car.I left it mounted,but after I installed a 350 and turbo 400 in it the traction was still terrible.

 

The first one I heard of was a Gyro stabilizer bar that was in a police cruiser. Weighed about 70 pounds and was suppose to improve traction.