The most frequently asked question we get is whether we can make a custom item. The answer is yes… usually. Our company is actually just an office with mostly office-type equipment. The cubes, the display cases and that thing you’re thinking about are all made overseas (China, mostly).

When we want to add a new product to our lineup the project starts out as a simple email to one of these suppliers where we submit the idea and they respond with an analysis of the costs and time required to make it. That first round yields a prototype that is much higher in cost than what the price of the units will be once the production run is underway. This is because the manufacturer has to assign the task of making it to an engineer who most likely will have to personally work with the material usually involving many separate steps to finish the product. Only after the prototype is approved does the lab or factory then design a workflow to ramp up production to make many of those units in a streamlined fashion which is where the savings come in.

Note that this means that as a one-off, your custom order is always going to be stuck in the initial stage of the process that is the most expensive. You will bear the prototyping fees and the long wait and even the risk that it may not be to your liking without recourse of a refund. For our part we can tell you from experience what the costs and time to manufacture will be as well as our guess on how feasible your project is but it’s up to you whether you want to go through with it given the costs and risks involved.

In most cases Luciteria will not be able to buy your items and if we can offer a price it will likely not be very good. Why? Well, first of all we are a small company that, when it comes down to it, is in the import/export business. We buy materials from laboratories and factories which guarantee the purity of the elements they’re selling to us. When we buy from the public however we have to figure out what the purity is ourselves before we can sell it. Which is a problem when you don’t have sophisticated lab equipment like mass spectrometers, gas chromatographs and the like. We would need to take what you send us and turn around and send it out to a lab for analysis. In most cases this is unprofitable for small amounts of material.

The exception might be precious metals and other valuable samples but… in this case we’re honestly no better off for you than you just going to your local pawn shop.

Oh, and definitely no mercury.

Yeah, not gonna lie. Measured that way your bullion investments through Luciteria will return awful dividends.

The thing to remember is that in the making of the cubes (or most other items) the cost of the underlying metal is only part of what goes into the final cost of the piece. Just as you don’t buy jewelry by weight the same applies here. Whereas a machine can spit out finished objects at very low cost, the making of the cubes involves many steps involving several different workers.

No, sorry. Our office is located in an office building with a secured entrance not open to the general public except by appointment. You’re not missing much to be honest. Just about everything we sell on the site comes to us from overseas labs pre-packaged and is stored in bins and shelves for easy shipping rather than showcasing. We did consider having a retail front but the permits and insurance are a headache so leaving this for some future date to consider.

Yes. If the item is still showing on the website it hasn’t been discontinued and we mean to replenish it. It’s just that, to be honest, we suck at keeping appropriate stock levels. The minute something is sold out an email is generated then someone (ahem, me) reads it and says “wooops, how’d that happen?” and an order is immediately sent to the supplier to please rush more sooner-than-asap.

Your order will not come with a paper certificate showing a compositional analysis, only a label identifying the element (and purity on >1g samples). I like to warn customers who ask for a certificate something that seems common sensical: you know it’s just a piece of paper, right? An official looking certificate can be made in Word in, oh, about five minutes one handed while drinking coffee. The only COA you should trust is the one provided not by the seller but by an independent lab.

However, we get it. It’s not practical to send your ten grams of whatever to a lab for analysis since it will likely cost you more than the sample you bought many times over. But hey it’s your moolah. Upon request we can give you a screenshot from our analyzer proving the purity of most metals. We can also do the same for a sample you bought elsewhere - turning us into that independent lab by the way - for a nominal cost. X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) cannot test low density elements but is an excellent tool for checking out the purity of alloys and pure elements from the meaty middle of the Periodic Table.

Currently, for Washington state and California the answer is yes. Other states may or may not according to rules imposed on the payment gateway. We’re not aware of the rates or even whether they’re imposed or not because it happens earlier in the payment process than we have anything to do with.

For international orders we do not charge any taxes, duties or VAT. These are assessed at the point of entry at your destination and happens haphazardly. We can - and do - typically lower the declared value for these orders to both help avoid attracting the wrong kind of interest in transit as well as to (hopefully) minimize the payment amount demanded by your postal carrier at the time of delivery. If you have a particularly difficult time with your customs officials you’re welcome to reach out to us to review options but remember this is something that is ultimately out of our control.