I have become seriously delinquent in the updates. That's what happens when you get busy with real work I guess.
The muffle furnace was a disaster. I was able to fire the IrO hot enough, but since I let it go for so long, the salt vaporized and formed a glaze on the inside of the furnace. Jason explained to me (rather after the fact) that he wasn't surprised in the least that this had happened, and it was actually a pretty common problem they had to deal with when he was taking a ceramics class as an undergraduate. Basically what happened was this... There was a crack in one of the shelves in the furnace, and one of the three crucibles was set directly over the crack. This allowed a hot spot for form and the crucible broke, leaking molten salt onto the ceramic. The hot salt fused with the ceramic and lowered the melt temp just enough to make the crucible, shelf, iridium residue, and heating element meld together into one big block of solid meteorite like material. I'm really just about done with this whole process. I'm going to take on what I've got for the iridium and call it good enough. Pictures soon of the muffle furnace disaster. I'm really really busy with real chemistry.
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