Hi, Dinora. The old mercury mirrors were in fact tin mirrors where the tin was dissolved in mercury to make a sticky shiny alloy which with mercury is called an "amalgam". This was pressed onto the glass surface with heavy weights for a long time until it stuck. Over time (like about a cen...

From the chemist: The chemical properties of zinc make it very unlikely that it will be displaced from solution to form elemental zinc which would be shiny if produced at the right rate. The same is true of aluminum which is why both of these metals are used to protect other metals like iron. Adding...

Ismael, I think you may be misunderstanding the purpose of an MSDS and therefore the interpretation attached to information contained in it. The purpose is to provide safety-related information on a material that the person handling it may not be familiar with (such as a factory worker). As such, OS...

Why thank you, Rod, I'm kinda proud of them. I wish I could claim that we did that but we are just lowly purveyors of tools and supplies. Our customer deserves the praise. Although I did have to help calculate the surface area of the inside of a sphere so they could use the right amount of chemicals...

You only should need distilled or deiononized water when chemistry is involved. Even washing the mirror afterwards shouldn't be a problem as the deposit has been done by then. Stripping or polishing will need clean water once you have removed the "crud" but then just one final pass. The so...

Unfortunately, there is one benefit and lots of costs, most of them "indefinite". You may end up ahead of the game but you need to be careful of some administrative headaches that I have run into in my career as a Database Administrator. First off, as you noted, your existing provider tran...

This is a surprise to me. While ferric chloride (iron perchloride) will certainly dissolve copper, it seems unlikely that it would attack silver. Standard chemical techniques for removing silver use an approach where something dissolves a very small amount of the silver which is then complexed by am...