The receptionist seemed a bit confused about who she should direct me to, but finally went in back to find an engineer: Presumably she thought he would at least know what I was talking about. I immediately thought CHROMIUM and took a walk over to their front office. I noticed I was sitting with nothing to do just across the street from what bills itself as the largest manufacturer of automotive bumpers in the country, Flex-n-Gate. My van had broken down (bad battery) and I was waiting at Peter B's repair shop for them to put in a new one. These small ingots are dissolved and electroplated onto bumpers at the Flex-n-Gate manufacturing plant in Urbana, Illinois. Solid nickel is used in various scientific and commercial processes that require a chemically inert, high-melting point material that isn't as expensive as platinum (the gold standard, ha ha, in this application). It's a major component of stainless steel (which is an alloy of iron, nickel, and chromium). Nickel is widely used as a plating metal, underneath chromium plating on car bumpers for example. US nickels are not primarily made of nickel, but Canadian quarters were until 2001, so it's not hard to find little disks of nickel. My periodic table poster is now available! Facts, pictures, stories about the element Nickel in the Periodic Table
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