Of course the sublimation won't work unless I have a thermometer with which to monitor the sand bath temperature. Most of our thermometers in the lab have broken threads, meaning there are gaps in the column of mercury. Argonne National Labs suggests dropping the thermometer from a short height. After a couple hundred drops with about four variations on height and padding thickness and I was ready to kick things up a notch.
I looked at the centrifuge for a couple minutes trying to figure out how I was going to counterbalance the thermometer and spin it up without breaking the top off. I settled on creating a bucket on a string, similar to the grade school experiment where you have a kid swing a bucket of water over his/her head. Except water isn't mercury. Long story short, the thermometer didn't break but the thread was still broken. On the bright side, I didn't have to bust out the mercury spill kit. After I left work frustrated, my labmate apparently put a heat gun on the bulb for about 4 minutes and viola! thermometer fixed (sort of, it's still miscalibrated by 3 C).
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