Making lava at home

Use glass.

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs (among other things)

void _-void-_ in the obvious place

Silica sand, glass.

I have some black glass grit for blast cabinet, this would seem to be the safest route to take. Thanks a lot.

i

Iggy,

I assume that after you melt it you want to pour it over something so it can flow downhill and cool into lumps and rocks? With glass I'm afraid that you will get all kinds of internal strains and the lumps will be very prone to shattering. You definitely don't want glass fragments flying around. How about using table salt instead?

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

Iggy. All the rocks you will find in your area contain water that will turn to steam and explode when heated rapidly. Please use some of the actual lava rocks you wrote about and first heat them for an hour or more in a hot oven to drive the moisture out. May need to do this several times. Your local rocks are basalt and will take forever to get the water out. Exploding rocks are not funny! They are very dangerous.

Your 1800 degree forge will just get the rocks red. The will not melt. A quick Google search shows lava temperatures of 2200 degrees F.

I think the glass suggestion will be a better choice.

Paul

Salt is even better, melting point only 1480F or so. I like it.

i

I do not know for sure, but I would try to find some slag at a dump for a blast furnace.

Bill

The other - broken pyrex glass. That is high temp glass and resists stressing. It might work.

I have t> Iggy,

That slag is also sold at Home Depot as some fancy shmancy "landscaping" rock. I like it a lot. I think that I will buy a bag of that stuff, as I could use it for anything I want. Then I will put a couple of lbs in a grill for 1-2 hours, and I will be good to go. It is more lava like than salt.

i

Is that real lava rock or slag? (both should work well)

i

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That's borosilicate glass----melts at a much higher temperature than 1800F.

Harold

Do you have a temperature controller on the furnace, if so then you could pour the glass over something then let it cool and place it back in the furnace to anneal. The glass pieces I blow are placed in a lehr and held at about 500C until the blowing day is finished then the lehr slowly brought down to room temperature overnight to prevent stress being built up in the glass. IIRC above the strain point, about 500C for the glass I use, you cannot induce permanent stress in the glass. Below that point you need to cool the piece slowly enough that damaging thermal stresses aren't created. The thicker the glass the longer the cooling cycle.

Does it have to be high temperature rock? Why not use sulfur? It melts at 113 deg C. It comes from volcanoes. It is flammable and has some interesting properties. You can or could buy it at the drugstore by the pound.

Sodium carbonate is washing soda Na2CO3, baking soda is the similar bicarbonate NaHCO3.

jsw

Try sulfur. Melts at 113deg C.

RCM only

On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:21:27 -0500, the infamous Ignoramus23032 scrawled the following:

Ig, when I was your kid's age, we got the little black pellets on the

4th of July. I think they were called "worms" or something. Anywho, you'd light the top and they'd glow red, sulfury-smoke a lot, and foamy slag would form on top which wormed its way out and down. If you could find those, I'm sure he'd be happy and they're MUCH safer. Kids'll be kids, and the thought of what would happen when a rock got thrown into a pool of real lava gives me the creeps.

Just a thought.

------------------------------------------------------ No matter how hard you try, you cannot baptize a cat. ----------------------------

You can get a eutectic mixture of sodium and potassium salts that has a melting temperature around 1200 or 1300 deg.F. IIRC.

This stuff is available commercially for salt bath heat treatment furnaces.

When red hot this salt becomes conductive and may be heated further by passing a current through it.

Wolfgang

That novelty thing is exactly what I was thinking of, and it hasn't been too many years since I last saw them.