Dr. Polemic wrote:
Danged, several weeks of work shot because it just hadn't
occurred to him that ni-cad would boil at room temperature.

I doubt that it *boils* at room temperature; evaporates slowly, maybe. At least, not at
the temperature of any rooms I've been in.

Oh, it boiled off! Damned fast too! And no, you wouldn't fit
into the 18" vacuum jar this was in.

The way to get ni-cad to boil at room temperature is simply
reduce the pressure to something significantly below its vapor
pressure. We did it knowingly with gold too once, and that was
nothing short of beautiful as far as the results went. The
entire inside of the bell jar was very faintly plated with gold.
That particular experiment was testing the voltage breakdown of
ceramic wafers, so in addition to the gold plating there was the
bluish white glow from a high voltage arc too. Really great
visual effects!

That was 40 years ago...

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)