New tool: the Loggerhead

OK, it's a 1/2" steel rod I picked up at Home Depot.  But I figure that once I heat it up and plunge it into a drink, it will be a loggerhead. 

I would have a new experiment tonight with my new tool, but as I was preparing for it, I took a glance at the pricetag attached to the rod, and noticed it said "Zinc Coated".  "Hmm," I thought to myself, "I wonder what temperature zinc melts at?"  Wikipedia told me it's around 787 deg. F, which is well within the temperature range I'm working in.  It also told me that zinc is relatively toxic when consumed in high dosages, and the fumes from heating it cause a non-fatal but unpleasant syndrome called "metal fume fever".

Whoops.

I could have gone over to the hardware store and gotten a new, un-galvanized steel rod, but where's the fun in that?  I seemed to remember from high school chemistry that zinc is fairly reactive, and a little googling found me a few forum posts on removing zinc plating from steel that recommended muriatic (hydrocholoric) acid.  I didn't have any of that around, but I did have some distilled vingear (~5% acetic acid solution).  So, I roughed up the end of the rod with a file (more surface area), threw a couple of inches of vinegar in a plastic bucket, and let the rod sit for an hour.  Sure enough, when I checked back, there was a little film of bubbles collected around where the rod met the vingear, and the roughed-up sections were starting to change their appearance a bit.  The bubbles are hydrogen gas. I took a long match and tried to light them for fun, but I guess there just wasn't enough compared to the amount of liquid around them, and the match went out with little fanfare.

I'm going to leave the rod in the vinegar overnight and see how it looks.  I'll also have to either buy a lot more vingear, or find a taller, narrower (or wider, flatter) vessel to hold the rod under the liquid and strip off more of the zinc.