[Mr. Pink]

I thought, after my glorious return from a 6-month hiatus, I would, ya know, do something. I wanted for all of you to poast your element collections. Mine is pretty crappy, I havn't been able to expand on it since school started. Ironically, all the homehork my Science 8 chem teacher has piled on me about "The Three States of Matter" is keeping me from making a nuclear battery, and my hydrogen generator project has been put on hold. Here's my collection so far:

Hyrdogen: Unpressurized jar from my generator.
Beryllium: Little 1 gram ball.
Boron: Vial of brown powder.
Carbon: 1cm thick rods.
Nirogen/Oxygen: A jar.
Sillycone: Little semimetal chunk in vial.
Sulphur: Big crystals.
Lead: Some little melted blobs.
Mercury: A little vial of it. Got it from all the thermostats we had replaced. DON'T WORRY KIDS, I used rubber gloves.
Radium: Some paint and a fleck of salt I keep in a sealed glass ampule. Radiation on outside of ampoule: 55cpm. I keep it in my RadMax safe.
Thorium: Tiny tiny tiny slab. In vial in my radmax safe.
Uranium: Tiny tiny sticks in a jar in my radmax safe.
Americium: Little salt buttons from, you guessed it, smoke detectors.

I would put up pictures but I don't own a camera.

[AgG]

I used to have an element collection until I made spices out of it and put it into my room mate's food...

[P-man]

How nice. He must've been really pleased.

[limpet chicken]

Hows about we up the stakes, and post chemical inventories?

I shall, asthey say, step into the fray

Sulfur.
NaOH
Al foil and granules
60% aq. formic acid.
16% HCl.
KMnO4
NaMnO4
NH3Cr2O7
NH3 12% aq.
Methyl ethyl ketone
Methyl isobutyl ketone
Acetone
MeOH/EtOH anhydrous mix
Glacial acetic acid w/ dissolved acetic anhydride
Red phosphorus.
White phosphorus
Cl2
I2
NaCl
Hg
HgI2
HgCl
HgI
CaO
Ca(OH2)
Am241 (yup, you guessed where from already )
O-tolidine
Phenolpthalein
Anthranilic acid
PdCl2
Pt dust
Ferrous sulfate
potassium ferrocyanide
MnO2
hydroquinone
acetylene
butane
Diethyl ether
NaCl
gamma-butyrolactone
PbO2
PbSO4
ammonium nitrate
Cobaltous chloride.

There are also a "few" organics that I would also rather not go into great detail about.

Those are my "main" reagents I keep around.

Currently working on as and when:

Benzaldehyde
2,5-dimethoxybenzaldehyde
Nitroethane
Nitromethane
Nitric acid
pressurised tanks of anhydrous chlorine, ammonia, oxygen and hydrogen.

[billnotgatez]

I will not include all the household compounds like baking soda. I will only list the items that I have for experiments.
Aluminum Powder
Iron Oxide Powder
Nitrocellulose doping paint
Acetyl Butyrate doping paint
Nitrocellulose doping paint thinner
Acetyl Butyrate doping paint thinner
Unbleached 100% cotton muslin sheeting cloth

[jdurg]

Well... ummm.... I'd post photos and a list of my elements, but we kind of already have a few pages on this site dedicated to that.  

[science2000]

From the basic chemicals and stuff I've synthesized the following:

Magnesium ammonium phosphate (very nice crystals)
Aluminum chloride
Calcium carbonate, acetate
Zinc sulfate, acetate, chloride, salicylate, carbonate
Ammonium sulfate, chloride
Nickel sulfate, acetate, chloride
cobalt acetate, hydroxide
ferric acetate, chloride, hydroxide
copper acetate, chloride, salicylate, tartrate (very nice crystals)carbonate
Gold chloride (and lots of chlorine gas!! but worth it.)

[woelen]

My element collection: http://woelen.scheikunde.net/science/chem/compounds/index2.html
This already is a nice collection, although it lacks the more expensive platinum-metals   . I do not have the colorless gases in the collection. I do not care about them, I can also show a bottle full of air   .

Part of my chemicals: http://woelen.scheikunde.net/science/chem/compounds/index.html

A more complete list of my chemicals: http://woelen.scheikunde.net/science/chem/exps/exppatt.cgi?list=compounds

Many chemicals I only have in small quantities, less than 100 grams. Some of them even only a few grams. I also made some of the chemicals myself.

[pantone159]

I don't have photos of my personal collection, which is actually practically complete now.

By 'practically' I mean that I settle for CaF2 for F, some natural uranium minerals and radium watch hands for Tc,At,Rn,Fr,Ra,Ac,Pa, trinitite for Pu, a smidgeon of luminous paint for Pm, various Am-241 sources for Am,Np (Np-237 is the decay product) and I am without any Cm or higher elements.  Po is easily available in c. 50 ng (250 uCurie) amounts in photographic anti-static brushes.

I have the gases both in small transparent vials (not so interesting) and also in spectral tubes that I can connect to a transformer and see the spectral lines and colors (very interesting!).

Otherwise, I have macroscopic samples (mostly >1 g) of all the rest.

I'm quite pleased with my set, actually, and it would never have been possible to put it together without the internet, I don't think.

As far as elements that I can't get, I have collected some photos here:
http://gotexassoccer.com/elements/index.htm
(Disclaimer:  Almost all the photos are blatantly plagarized from other sources on the web.)

[golden]

A newly received bottle of 30g of mercury

[jdurg]

Yeah, it's pretty expensive to try and get really sizeable samples of the platinum group metals.  Of all the money spent on my collection, the PGMs have basically taken up the most of that money.  Thankfully I was able to get a really sizeable sample of Rhodium metal prior to its sudden spike in price.  (I purchased my button when Rh was at about $800 an ounce, and right now it's about $3,000 an ounce!).  With the PGMs, what I've done for the expensive ones is just purchased small amounts at a time, then eventually "trading up".  I've been very fortunate to have done some trade ups with some of the element dealers I frequently purchase from as they've taken my multiple buttons of a metal and traded me an equal-in-mass larger button.  I still need to get some more Osmium so I can get a troy ounce button similar to my iridium button, but that's going to take some time.

What I've found is that once you get the bulk of your collection done, you can then start to really specialize and try and upgrade the samples you have.  For a long time, I had some sodium metal but no 'unoxidized' sodium.  I then found a dealer who sold pure sodium metal in an unoxidized form sealed in a glass ampoule under argon.  Now I have a nice sample of sodium.  I hope to do that soon with my potassium metal as well.  (Though right now I need to get a picture of my potassium.  On one corner of my block, there was some freshly exposed metal surface which has oxidized in an unusuall manner.  Right now, it has a deep, blood-red color to it with a pearlescent shine.  This doesn't look anything like the peroxide/superoxide that I have read about, so I'd like to get some opinions on what it could possibly be.  Right now, it's just really impressive looking).

For the gases, I'll also agree that having a vial of a clear gas is pretty useless.  The discharge tubes are great for holding samples of the gases as you can run a small current through them and see the spectrum of that gas.  For oxygen, I try not to discharge it too often as the high voltage results in formation of ozone gas out of the O2 gas and that will corrode the ampoule after some time.

[science2000]

Would it be cheaper, jdurg, if you extracted rare metals from scrapped computers and other things? Or an old piece of jewelery? Isn't it more interesting doing stuff yourself. I've extracted gold from a CPU, that was rewardingm even though the gold chloride I got isn't anything to boast about.

[jdurg]

It can be done, but you would need a LARGE amount of source material.  Each CPU or microchip has only a few nanograms of gold metal on there as the plating is actually quite thin.  You would have to also realize that some of the gold would wind up being lost as you scrape off the plating, or try and purify it chemically.  (As some of it would be lost during the filtration).

If you had access to a very large number of old computer parts, then you could possibly wind up with a visible amount of gold.  It's just that the time, chemicals, and effort needed to get this gold may wind up costing you more than the gold metal itself.

(BTW, it is indeed a lot more fun to create the elements on your own.  My red selenium and chlorine gas was created from other chemical sources, so those elements have a bit of a special place in my collection).