I have white metal shavings all over my floor, and was wondering how carefully I should suck them up as I have dogs that lick EVERYTHING.
(Which is great when you spill food, not so great if it contains lead!) [:D]
Definitely vacuum them up. There are all sorts of heavy metals in diecast. Lead poisoming takes a long time however, so if they get a little in won’t harm them Repeated exposure is the culprit here.
There are many different alloy compositions that are called white metal, so your best bet is to keep them vacuumed up.
This is a little off topic, but not quite. If you or you dogs do injest heavy metals, liquid zeolite, a supplement, will remove them pretty efficiently.
I use to love heavy metals but now that the late 40’s have crept up on I don’t like it as much.
Oh oh wrong kind of heavy metal, sorry carry on.(must have been one of those flashback things?)
Some of the older metal kits contain lead but the new ones are made from an alloy called speltzer, which contains no lead.
Also metallic lead and mercury pass through the body with very little, if any, absorption. It needs to be a salt, like lead chloride or lead oxide, to be absorbed by the body. Remember all them veterans with lead bullets in their body since world war 2, don’t hear about them getting lead poising. And the white metal from recent kits will be lead free anyway as already stated. Fred
Even if the metal were totally inert, it still has sharp edges from machining. These would be likely to irritate the entire digestive tract, since they won’t be digested. Of course, it would allow you to use a metal detector when searching for dog doo, but that’s not much of an advantage given the rest of the drawbacks.
As stated above, it depends on the vintage, and to some extent brand, of your white metal castings. Back in the 40’s and early 50’s, white metal could be anything cheap and heavy and many of them probably contained lead. Mantua/Tyco used Zamac for their steam loco boiler and frame castings as well as the metal bodies and weights in the plastic diesels. Zamac is an alloy of zinc and aluminum. Bowser used to use Zamac but switched to pure zinc about a decade or so ago.
What vintage and brand(s) are you talking about that were the source of these shavings?
Just a little off topic, but I was reading an (MR) article today from a book called “Classic Articles from Model Railroader” about doing scenery. In the 1950s vintage how-to the author suggested mixing asbestos fibers (50-50) with plaster to make it more resilient![:O]
Who says model railroaders don’t live on the edge?[8D]
-George
Back then asbestos was harmless, as far as anybody knew.
Uh-huh, and don’t forget to clean your rails with Carbon Tet… (That used to be done too.)
BTW, the Boy Scout Railroading MB used to have that recipe for hardshell back ib the 50’s.
Do you think that if lead were exposed to hydrochloric acid with a pH of 1.0 that you might form a salt? That’s what happens if you ingest metals through the digestive tract–swallow them.
Yep, shredded asbestos, carbon tetrachloride, solvent based paints with no paint booth or mask, lead solder, exposed mercury used for turntable indexing – model railroaders lived life on the edge back in those days. And some of the older articles on building your own power supply featured some 110 volt wiring that would not be recommended either. Many model railroaders were photographed back then calmly smoking a pipe …
Dave Nelson
Th January 1955 issue of “Model Trains” TIPS recommends the use of regular white gasoline for removing adhesive tape from control panels .
Peter Smith, Memphis
One spark and BOOM, you wouldn’t have to worry about the control panel anymore.
…and wouldn’t do the soles of your feet, your socks, your pet’s paws, your slippers, or your carpeting/linoleum a great deal of good.
I am not a chemist, but this does not ring true for me. First, lead bullets are almost always coated with copper or something else, so the likelihood of lead poisioning is reduced to an extent, although I don’t know how much. Also, lead oxide does not sound to a non-chemist as if it would be characterized a salt. I would very much be interested in being put right about this since it is an important subject, and even I can stand to learn something about it. [:)]
I think that most white-metal castings now-a-days iare made of zinc alloys. Still carries good weight, but is less toxic . As for the guy with the dogs, vacuum your floors to keep the pooches from licking that stuff up!
These are called full metal jackets, but they are also designed to mushroom on impact. The copper coating was/is fairly thin and soft. My Dad was severely wounded in WWII by the German version and he was able to keep one of the bullets that got him. It was mushroomed badly, and this was with a belly shot.