[Rockhounds] Smelter Nickel

[Albert McCann]

Huh. This lurker has one of those. A guy at work (who just retired) gave me
one of these things years ago.

I've put a pic up here:

http://www.familymccann.org:5679/nickel.jpg

It's about 9.5cm long, there are bubbles in the metal on the 'bottom' of the
globules. I was told it's nickel, and that it was formed by pouring molten
nickel into some kind of liquid, guy said oil, but there's no residue if it
was. It does not have the look of an object that was used in a plating
process.

I once worked in a printed circuit manufacturing company (many decades
ago...) and we did nickel plating. The anodes were bar shaped, and we never
got anything on the edge of the vats that looked like this.

Al 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rockhounds-bounces at lists.drizzle.com 
> [mailto:rockhounds-bounces at lists.drizzle.com] On Behalf Of 
> Lawrence Rush
> Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 3:34 PM
> To: Rockhounds at drizzle.com: A mailing list for rock and gem collectors
> Subject: [Rockhounds] Smelter Nickel
> 
> OK...this time I DO have a  real puzzle..................
> 
> In the 1980's, I used to attend a swap session every summer in New 
> Hampshire. For several years there, a gentleman would 
> approach me (he did 
> not have a booth), and offer to trade me a Nickel specimen. 
> These came out 
> of a smelter somewhere, and were attractive, being kind of 
> globular, and 
> kind of dendritic, and shiny metallic. It was maybe 4x8cm in 
> size. No label, 
> and I wasn't sophisticated enough to ask for one.
>