Curious

So there we are, strolling along the promenard when we pass a big rubbish bin with some empty 4 pint beer kegs, the sort that have the CO2 in with the beer. My wife says, they would make nice waste paper baskets !! - Hope they are what they look like and nothing serious! (Sailsbury)

Ok, so we have one in the workshop, empty and gas less. Carefully grinding the seal between the lid and the body of the barrel away leaves me with the empty barrel and a small aerosole can stuck to the floor of the barrel. Remove aerosole and check no pressure, and remove the top of the aerosole (Because it rattles) and inside its full of small black pellets. I assume these are carbon (CO2 ??).

Would these be any good for case hardening ?

BobH

..check first for polonium..?

I remember quite a few years ago that certain cans of beer had a plastic widget in the can pressurised with nitrogen that caused the dissolved CO2 in the beer to form a fine froth when the can was opened.

Two examples are Boddingtons, and John Smiths extra smooth, still available. Somebody must like the stuff, they are not CAMRA members.

or my more sensible answer..
I see no reason why those pellets would be carbon.. but if they are graphite then it should be both soft and can ake marks on paper. I'd guess its anything inert that can be used to stir up the liquid phase of whatever gas was in the aerosol.

If you need carbon for case hardening, charcoal seems (to me) the most readily available or makeable solution. To case harden, you need a furnace and a closed heat-resistant container. So, you have already got what you need. Fill the container with wood - hardwood seems to be preferred - and close the lid but not airtight. Heat in the furnace for an hour or so (remembering that the fumes will be inflammable) and allow to cool.

Much better than guessing what your pellets are (and possibly getting it seriously wrong).

Cheers, Tim

Agree something inert, but I wondered if it might be activated charcoal? It might improve the whoosh by discharging gas through millions of tiny orifices. Setting a pellet on fire would show if it was carbon or not.

It's a sad state of affairs when even beer is too complicated to understand!

Dave

Actually the first is quite easy to understand, the second and third are a bit harder to figure out and after that ANYTHING is too complicated to understand

I think it was Clive the bee man who recommended scraps of leather as a good source of case hardening carbon so I have collected a small sack full ready for when things get serious! 

By the way Clive, how are the bees doing these days?

Rik

Edited By Rik Shaw on 05/07/2019 18:09:25

Hi, oh! you get past the first one OK then Nick

Regards Nick.

Not Clive, but I needed to capture a swarm yesterday. Watched it ‘buzz’ along a row of yew bushes and settle about 2 1/2m up, late Wednesday afternoon. An easy job to collect in a plastic bucket and pour into a hive.

Not sure if it was a large cast or small prime, so left queen excluder below, so will have to remove it tomorrow, just in case she needs to go on a mating flight. Actually a look in will likely show if she has started laying - I would not be surprised if she is. Hopefully a prime swarm but not a really large one.

‘A swarm in July is not worth a fly’ is what they say, but I’ll take it and be pleased, all the same.

Clearly not a good June. A lot of stores used up, but I don’t bother too much these days - as long as we get enough honey to keep us going.

My niece once had a job with John Smiths trying to get pubs to sell that Extra Smooth stuff. She left after I told her that in my opinion, as an experienced beer drinker, it was specially brewed for people who didn't like beer

Ah the widget. I worked at a toolmaking company in the 70s and worked on the mould for them. They didn't catch on straight away. I seem to recall we had to core out a hole of 0.013" diameter to allow the air into (or out of ?) the widget to make them work.

If a cask ("What's a keg?" asked the ex-CAMRA member) contained anything other than ale (and "air" , I wouldn't touch it!

(Multiple edits to try to exterminate invasive emojis. Grrr!)

Edited By Kiwi Bloke 1 on 07/07/2019 10:03:11

Edited By Kiwi Bloke 1 on 07/07/2019 10:03:47

Edited By Kiwi Bloke 1 on 07/07/2019 10:04:27

Edited By Kiwi Bloke 1 on 07/07/2019 10:05:46

Think you're right Duncan. Time for an introduction to Timothy Taylor?

However, I have consumed the widget stuff when abroad when the only alternative was San Miguel! Both taste like dead rats, but the widget stuff less so.

Charred leather also contains nitrogen so (supposedly) has a slight nitriding effect.

Also, I think it gives nice patterns and is used in gunmaking.

I once did some work on the structure of foams with a mathematician at Trinity Dublin - he was a canny chap, got a grant from Guinness and stipulated that that large quantities of their product would be needed for experimental investigations to test his theoretical models. They naturally agreed.

The 'widgets' were made of plastic and did indeed contain nitrogen. Nitrogen was used because it is (a) cheap and (b) relatively insoluble in water. For reasons to do with surface tension the internal pressure small 'bubbles' in a foam is generally higher than in large bubbles so there is tendency for foams to 'coarsen' - big bubbles grow at the expense of small ones. The dominant mechanism for gas transport across the boundary is dissolution in the water phase then diffusion, so nitrogen enhanced foams are more stable than pure CO2. Which is good for Guinness and presumably Boddie's &c.

Helium might be even better from a solubility point of view, but it's expensive and you might get chucked out of the pub for talking in a silly voice before you'd had your proper fill.

Robin.

Edited By Robin Graham on 09/07/2019 00:34:18

Edited By Robin Graham on 09/07/2019 00:37:42

Hi Rik, I am out of action at the moment with a trapped nerve inbetween L4/5. The same thing happened about 6 years back and put me out for about 6 weekks. Now in my fourth week of deep pain and lack of mobility.

The last time I looked at the bees they were OK, flying well and still shirty ! The hives are sat on a piece of ground that is infested with Ground Elder which I have to strim back now and then, done it once and no doubt due again but unable to go down and do it.

Pain relief, zilch as Tramadol gives me a bad headache and Co-Codomol has no effect so I take two paracetomol in the morning and two at night. Elder Bro. coming down at end of month so I hope I improve before then.

Clive

Hi Clive. I have a similar problem from time to time. Once you are fit, I do a 10 minute work out when I get up with specific exercises -EVERY morning followed by a 45 minute walk. When I have had a chronic bout, a 1 day stay in hospital under morphine, followed by prescription KETAPROFINE works wonders for me, but we are all different. Good luck and the bees will probably make out OK anyway.

In my misspent youth I toured pubs with CAMRA friends and found many beers make me ill. Real-ales were most poisonous and I decided the allegedly better taste wasn't worth the risk. Watneys Starlight did me much less harm.

Not being a beer enthusiast myself I noticed many excuses made about real-ale as drunk in pubs: not kept properly (too hot or too cold), disturbed in transit, too young, too old, Master Brewer on holiday, 'r' in the month, pump need cleaning, past it's prime etc etc etc. Despite the current session being average everyone had a tale of the perfect pint they'd enjoyed, 'somewhere else in the distant past'. No-one ever drank a 'perfect pint' in my company!

As the other main topic of conversation was the untried awfulness of 'fizzy beer' I grew suspicious that real-ale might just be ordinary beer with bragging rights. If true this is different psychological territory, nothing to do with taste - people don't spend £20,000 on a Rolex because it keeps better time, or buy personalised number plates because their car goes faster. Real-ale might be a close relative of extreme Serious Audiophilia, which engineers know to be a complete joke.

I don't believe beer tasting has been trialled scientifically? This involves carefully removing all clues and randomising samples to eliminate observer bias. Blindfolding tasters and isolating them during a controlled trial would likely produce very different results from what happens down the pub in front of an audience. Turns out people are good at reading social clues and poor at staying objective in the face of group-think. If you suspect wine judges don't really know what they're talking about draw comfort from this report.

Another example is feeling better after the doctor prescribes an inert medication, the Placebo Effect. What's odd is that placebo effect still works for some people even after they've been told it's a placebo. And despite being trained to eliminate observer bias, scientists also come unstuck from time to time by unconsciously or selfishly interpreting evidence to support a pre-judged conclusion. (Science does better than average though because scientific conclusions and evidence are subjected to well-focussed peer-review, much like some of my dud posts are corrected by forum members.) Even so, changing what we believe is really difficult, even when the belief is shown to be wrong!

I encourage everybody to trial a wide range of beers and report back. Only by getting sloshed shall we determine the truth...

Dave

I spend a lot of time in Spain and have sampled San Miguel on more than once and to my 'non expert' knowledge, thought it was Lager rather than beer. I've never tasted dead rats, so I'll take you're word for it haha!