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Where can I get tritium?


Clerek

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I want to relume my SA, and was thinking of using tritium, but I couldn't find it. So I thought of using Super LumiNova, but couldn't find that to purchase anywhere!

Can someone please point me in the right direction.

I've used the hell out of the search, but all i can come up with was what the two looked like, and how it worked for different people. Nothing about where they got it from!

Thanks,

-Ricardo

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tritium is a non issue unless you decided to eat the stuff and even then you would have to eat large quantities of it

+1

Tritium emits beta particles. Beta particles are unable to even penetrate the layer of dead skin cells that covers all of us.

It will not make you glow. It is easy to handle safely. I have used it in the laboratory more times than I can count.

The problem is if you swallow, breathe, or absorb it through your skin. In such a case, you have it doing its work on your cells from very small distances without shielding.

I don't know exactly what the U.S. NRC licensing requirements are for possession and transfer of the material, but I do remember keeping copious records of every microCurie used.

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? for you lumeheads - Should a good lume last all night? Not beta powered tritium, but the new stuff? I have have 2 gens (both around $1300) and about 10 reps.

NONE of them last more then 10 min. Never really read up on The Zigmeister and what have you, so I a Noob in this area for sure.

Any idea how long a gen Brit SA should last (in the market for a dial or a lume)?

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My father used to tell me a story about the women who worked with tritium paint in watch factories located near him when he was a boy.

The women would sharpen their paint brushes to a fine point by licking them over and over as they hand-painted the numerals.

Eventually all their teeth would fall out.

That's why you can't have a self-luminating watch face.

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? for you lumeheads - Should a good lume last all night?

No, that's a myth. The real value of good lume is that it glows enough for pilots and divers to see. They can and do work in darkness. REAL darkness, not your car at night or your bedroom. In that kind of darkness, quality lume glows enough to see for a very long time.

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The paintbrush-licking story -- I thought that was Radium, not Tritium.

Even Tritium you find these days is not going to glow so great, Tritium has a half-life of around 12 years, so 12 year old Tritium paint will only be half as bright as when it was new.

One good thing about superLume is that it flouresces with UV.. so on a day which is dark because it's cloudy (rather than just night-time) or when you're under water, it can appear much brighter just due to this effect than merely by glowing due to precharge.

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This is a useful old quote from the timezone, posted by Justin Time on December 12, 1997

"Tritium paint on watches is a mixture of tritium and phospor. Tritium is naturally radio-active and needs no external source of light or charge to work. Tritium does not glow. As it decays, tritium emits beta radiation, which is a bunch of excited electrons that in turns excite the electron in the phosphor atoms making them emit photons, or light, as they return to their ground (non-excited) state: the phosphor GLOWS. Phosphor can also be excited by UV light from the sun or other light sources. Thus, the tritium paint relies on tritium radioactivity to make the phosphor glow in the dark, not any charge from external light source.

Tritium, has a half life of 12.3 years, a half-life is simply the time it takes HALF of the tritium to decay. So, as long as you have enough tritium in your paint, the watch will glow in the dark for years, not hours or days, without any need of charging. If your watch stops glowing after an hour in the dark, it means that the glow came from the light exciting the phospor atoms, not from the tritium. In other word, most of the tritium in your watch is GONE! This is quite possible even with a fresh coat of tritium paint if that paint has been sitting around in the watchmaker's shop or supplier's shelf for years. The 12.3 years of half-life starts from the second the tritium is born (i.e. freshly produced), not from the time the paint is applied to your watch."

http://www.timezone.com/library/archives/a...704126660375902

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Buy this one from DealExtreme and grind it down :) Add some adhesive and make paste! Done deal.

I have never done it myself, but looks like a viable option. You can also get white, blue, yellow and purple!

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