Readers might be somewhat distracted by my writing on a relatively obscure (for many onlookers, at any rate) subject area.
"But Andrew," I hear them say: "You have been living outside the UK for almost eight years, teaching English to kids . . . why on Earth blog about such a recondite field?"
I'll explain . . . although I graduated as a biological scientist, even before I graduated, people (meaning employers) always wanted me to do mainly chemical work, which is to say analytical chemistry of one kind or another. One of the culminating features of this experience was a set of three articles published in Metal Finishing magazine in New York, followed later by my book, "Rapid Spot Testing of Alloys, Metals and Coatings", which was published about a month after I arrived in Taipei.
My editor, Dr. Anselm Kuhn, very kindly sent me a free copy (I was the author, after all), and occasionally I show this to fellow sufferers in bars around Korea . . . on one such occasion recently, I pulled it out whilst chatting a now-departed (English) engineering friend, in the presence of another (American) engineering friend. They, of course, were suitably impressed, as indeed many are. A quick web search on Google turns up a small number of favourable reviews (for example, http://www.modernmicroscopy.com/main.asp?article=10, and even http://www.finishing.com/536/94.shtml and http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2005/0105789.html) for my book, and the suggestion was made that I could do a blog about "this kind of thing"; the idea was put forward that I have huge credibility in this area.
Well, okay . . . here's the blog.
So where did the idea come from? Well . . . in Metal Finishing magazine was a methodology for identifying surface deposits by Charles Rosenstein and Stanley Hirsch, which it was felt could be improved upon. LANL had also published an extensive tract on spot testing and these, along with a series of other sources, led us to think in the end that a complete and comprehensive book could be written on the subject. And so it was that "Rapid Spot Testing of Alloys, Metals and Coatings" came into existence.
Particularly, a series of jobs also led to this. I had been engaged in laboratory commissioning at the then-new Flue gas Desulphurisation Plant at the Powergen Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station near Nottingham in England, and a short time thereafter was engaged as a full-time chemical process controller at a company in my home town of Leicester, England, before becoming the last manager of the Royal Air Force's last Electroplating Shop at St. Athan in Wales, and it was here that I did all of the writing, until a dire change in circumstances inspired me to leave the UK and teach English in East Asia. Which is where I am right now!
The central idea of the book, which took two years to write, was that certain interested parties may need to identify either a solid metal or a surface deposit rapidly, or at least reduce it to one of a range of alloys, and that they might use a set of solutions and physical methods which they would then use to create a testing "kit" best suited to their particular requirements.
In this blog, then, we will look at some chemical phenomena which may be of use - and perhaps get a handle on some metal finishing methods along the way.
