  HUGE cylinder of Teflon.
This is a marvelously huge cylinder of pure solid slick-as-ice Teflon. It's surprisingly heavy: Unlike most plastics, which are typically lighter than water, Teflon is more than twice the density of water. Teflon is very useful stuff because almost nothing sticks to it, and it's impervious to most chemicals. But for purposes of element collecting its main value is that it packs a remarkably high percentage of fluorine into a small space. By weight, Teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene) is nearly 76% fluorine (the remainder being carbon). There are two fluorine atoms for every carbon atom, and each fluorine atom weighs more than the carbon atom.
This 31-pound cylinder thus contains about 23.5 pounds of fluorine and only 7.5 pounds of carbon, which makes it by far the largest raw quantity of fluorine in my collection. Of course it's not pure fluorine, and the properties of Teflon in no way resemble the properties of fluorine gas, but still, it's a heck of a lot of the element.
Source: eBay seller rdr-electronics
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 8 February, 2009
Text Updated: 10 February, 2009
Price: $100
Size: 12"
Purity: 76%
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