Tritium paint

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Tritium is a Hydrogen Isotope with two extra neutrons in addition to the single proton "regular Hydrogen" usualy posesses.

Since the arrangment is not stable, it decays, and re-arranges itself into Helium, releasing an electron, (and an anti-neutrino, which for all intents and purposes is almost utterly "nothing" billions of neutrinos fly through the earth, space, and your body every second, touching nothing...) An electron released in radioactive decay is known as a Beta particle. Loosely speaking, this is the "weakest" form of radiation. A beta-electron is different than "electricity". For one thing it's on it's solo, flying through space, and has a much, much, higher velocity/energy than it's brothers running through batteries and wires, but it's still blocked by most anything, skin, cloth, paper, or even just a few inches of air...

The electrons given off by the tritium's decay strike phosphors coating the inside of the night sight's glass capsule which collect the electron, raising their energy state, and then re-emit the energy as light. It's actualy kind of like a single colored phosphor dot on a TV tube screen, but lit by an electron from radioactive decay instead of the electron gun.

You can get "tritium burns" but it takes large amounts, and lots of exposure at least as compared to what's in a night sight capsule (if you broke it open, the glass capsule and phosphors contain the beta particles almost completely), and the tritium has to be bound up in something solid or liquid that you can ingest or rub on your skin for prolonged contact, and not in pure gaseous form.

As radioactive stuff goes, it's very safe. It's just regulated so tightly because Uncle Sam never gives up control willingly once he's got it. You can buy tritium keychains in Europe and the UK for a few bucks, and they're 20 times the size of night sight capsules. They're sort of sold as a glow-stick that lasts 20 years...
 
ceetee - I have a Walther P5C with a milled front sight. When the previous owner had nightsights installed, he sent it off to Trijicon who drilled the front blade and installed a tritium vial, and replaced the rear dove-tailed sight with an appropriate night unit. when I had the gun refinished at Robar, they had to replace teh front vial, and sent it off to a sub to doit. You could give them (www.robarguns.com) a call to get the name if you can't hook up with Trijicon- HTH.
 
Not a big concern from the amount of H-3 in a gun sight. If you break it, just let it air out for a while, preferably outside. Even if you managed to ingest the whole amount (pretty much impossible), it would not be biologically significant. The biological half life in the body ranges from 3-12 days depending on the individual.

I don't think tritium paint would work very well. I think the tritium would evaporate out the mixture.

Radium actually works better for such applications since it has a much longer half life and better properties for radioluminescence. It is a nasty actor biologically however as it is a calcium analog. It also a pain in the a** to clean up. I've removed radium dials from WW2 vintage aircraft and they still glow like the energizer bunny. Unfortunately, most of them leak over time and make a mess. The radium dial painters are a tragic story. Simple precautions could have prevented the problem. Unfortunately, the pendulum has swung to far the other way and we spent too much money controlling trivial radiation hazards.
 
As radioactive stuff goes, it's very safe. It's just regulated so tightly because Uncle Sam never gives up control willingly once he's got it. You can buy tritium keychains in Europe and the UK for a few bucks, and they're 20 times the size of night sight capsules. They're sort of sold as a glow-stick that lasts 20 years...

Yup. And you can get them here: http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=68028

Dunno if it's legal, but he apparently sells a bunch.
 
Exposure said:
I have no idea if this is an urban legend or not but some kid once found a bottle of radium paint in the back of a clock at a junk shop. He supposedly built a crude nuclear reactor with this a bunch of other stuff. True or not it makes for an interesting read!

Check it out here:

http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html

Pretty "dramatic" story. The kid certainly made a mess, but a breeder reactor I think not. Radium-Beryllium sources will make neutrons through an alpha,n reaction but pitchblende (uranium ore) and thorium from a lantern mantle rolled up in an aluminum ball around it won't do much in terms of producing Plutonium. It was never a reactor, i.e., there was no or extremely little fissioning and neutron multiplication going on. The bottom line is that the kid collected enough radioactive junk to make a nice mess.
 
di-tritium oxide added to a phosphor then added to a carrier and binder.

You can get tritium in small quantities, ask trijicon.

Grape Ape said:
The fact that it is used in the triggering mechanism in fusion bombs may cause Uncle Sugar to restrict the sale of half-gallon cans. And the fact that it is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that behaves similarly to hydrogen probably makes it difficult and dangerous to paint with.
 
It takes an NRC license, you can only use so much in a device which means you can't have those cool nuclear powered keychain lights like in *Britain* or *France*

jrfoxx said:
I fully understand the responses given, but if it's 'controlled' and/or 'dangerous', how do the companies who make tritium sights get it? Cant be TOO controlled or TOO hard to get, or all these watch, gun, etc companies couldnt get it to put on the products they sell us.
 
Tritium is available -- it's used in lots of biomedical applications in small quantities. I think most of it comes from Canda since Candian type reactors made lots of tritium. One could manufacture end user devices using it, but it would require an NRC license and the devices would have to meet approval for the sealed source device registry. Post 9/11, the NRC would probably frown on novelty applications such as key fobs so it might be difficult to do it and you would have to sell a whole lot of them to make it worthwhile.
 
Andrew Rothman said:
Yup. And you can get them here: http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=68028

Dunno if it's legal, but he apparently sells a bunch.


Hee hee... do we have a :shhh: smiley? :D

No, they're not legal in the U.S. The sellers are all in Europe where they are legal. None of the large mainstream retailers will ship them to the U.S. but small time eBay type guys will.

If you do get one intercepted by U.S. customs, they just confiscate it. Maybe send you a letter telling you why. However, I've never heard of an individual mail shipment being intercepted. Right now the hot item on Customs watch list are high powered green laser pointers from China, because of the doofuses who've been in the news for shining them at aircraft.

Besides, despite the pictures, the tritium key-chain fobs glow pretty dimly about the same as an organic chemical light-stick or less, under room or daylight, it just looks like a clear plastic pendant. So even if customs sees one, without close scrutiny, they may not recognize it as anything other than keychain junk.

So they're "letter of the law" illegal, but from a scientific standpoint, they're still pretty harmless, and they know it. So unless someone were to try and smuggle in thousands of them at once, it's not really on Uncle Sugar's radar at the current time.
 
I believe on the Meprolight webpage, they say if you purposly broke one of the vials of tritium, the ammount of radiation you would obsorb would be less than getting an X-Ray at the dentist
 
jrfoxx said:
Does anyone know of a source for buying tritium paint, or its equivalant? searches on forums and google yield nothing. I'm not looking for the types of paint that need to absorb light for 'recharging' (not practical for a home/selfdefense gun). Is there some regulation on this stuff that makes us not be able to buy it?

Just don't lick the brush to re-point it when painting with the stuff. :D
 
"There is NO radiation exposure associated with an intact tritium
sight. And even if you remove the capsule and eat it, the risk
is vanishingly small to nonexistent."

I think taking the night sights off your gun and eating them would require a very significant level of inebriation.
 
Pretty "dramatic" story. The kid certainly made a mess, but a breeder reactor I think not. Radium-Beryllium sources will make neutrons through an alpha,n reaction but pitchblende (uranium ore) and thorium from a lantern mantle rolled up in an aluminum ball around it won't do much in terms of producing Plutonium. It was never a reactor, i.e., there was no or extremely little fissioning and neutron multiplication going on. The bottom line is that the kid collected enough radioactive junk to make a nice mess.
I know from personal experience that a Coleman lantern mantle will make a Geiger counter go crazy, due to the radioactive thorium oxide.
 
Timely thread!

I bought myself a Colt 1991A1 Compact for Christmas. It's going to be my CCW gun when we get CCW in Nebraska, hopefully this year.

My local friendly FFL had it in stock forever...he was buying guns back in the 70's with the idea that he'd someday be able to open a gunstore.

BTW, this pistol functions flawlessly through the first 100 rds of several different types of ammo. It prints a 6" group at 10 yds, which is all I expected from a 3.5" bbl.

However, two of the 3 dot sights fell off/disintegrated when I first fired the pistol. I was thinking about a way to restore them, but then I decided to send it off to my gunsmith for a W/O rear and red fiber optic rod FS like I have on my IPSC Limited pistol.

Besides, the plastic trigger has to go and needs a little fine tuning.
 
OK, so it appears tritium paint is nonexistant. So what can I do to brighten up my front sight. Maybe a little white out?:confused:

Seriously, is there an easy and inexpensive way to brighten up that sight?
 
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