Science/Engineering/Technical forums

I like lead.

Me too. We also have a buncha "cerro bend" which is called something like cerro-safe when hospitals use it -- it's a low melt alloy with Cd in it, so it's some other use of the word safe than the docs usually use...Personally I prefer pretty pure lead unless I'm casting bullets (in which case I use all kinds of nutty alloys). The cerro stuff wets everything, and expands on hardening both of which are good for sticking into molds all too well. Nice job on that shield. I've been using an ad hoc stacked lead brick + sheet shield on the pancake we got from you in front of the fusor, to keep X rays from kind of overloading it so we can leave it on during runs, and have it right there to measure silver activations after a run. Since I log all the count data throughout, I get a background, then the fusor run, then background again, then the silver (or whatever) all time stamped in one file for looking at later. This was kind of the forerunner of our upcoming "standard counter", which incorporates some things I've learned along the way about what's useful to have around a fusor.