On 16-Mar-14 11:39 PM, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"thunk" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 15 Mar 2014 20:56:05 +0800, Kennedy
wrote:

On 15-Mar-14 7:46 PM, thunk wrote:
I have a bunch of the little silica gel packets saved and dry and
use
some from time to time. Just got a similar dessicant packet from
the
nori we made sushi with, and it's labelled "Lime Dessicant/Do Not
Eat/Do Not Open/Your Children Will Die/blah/blah".

So wp says this stuff is (by now) calcium hydroxide. Any use in
the
home shop? We eat a lot of sushi.


I dunno, but I do know you can re-dehydrate desiccant for reuse. Low
heat for a long time does the job.

Maybe put good tools in a ziplock baggy with a desiccant pack for
long
term storage.

I was thinking more as a chemical than as a dessicant. I find
myself
doing quite a bit of electrolytic derusting with the current batch
of
projects and might want to do some small plating after I find out
more
about it.

It could be only Quicklime, which you can buy cheaply in bulk.
http://www.limeindustries.com.au/index-3.html

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Quicklime

Unlike silica gel you have to heat it hot enough to destroy the packet
to dry and reuse it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silica_gel
"Once saturated with water, the gel can be regenerated by heating it
to 120 °C (250 °F) for two hours."



And it can be quite easy to overheat & destroy the silica gel packet,
guess how I know that........