Friday, July 11, 2014

Enjoy some glassmaking

The Beautiful Process of Turning Quartz Into Lab Glass at 3,000 Degrees

Via a respected reader and Gizmodo, a master scientific glassmaker doing his thing. (I gotta get me one of those torches.) 
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  1. OldnukeJuly 11, 2014 at 8:20 PM

    When I was a freshman chem major I surprised my advisor by making a perfect spiral GC column on my third try (our campus wasn't busy enough to have a glassblower). I'd done a fair amount of work with glass while I was in middle school and high school so I wasn't afraid of a little fire.

    A few weeks later I was visited by one of the P-chem professors who asked me to make a mercury vapor lamp for him. Off to the library I went to read about metal-to-quartz seals. Strangely enough, they weren't too concerned when I told them I needed a cylinder of hydrogen and some platinum salts.

    My first oxygen-hydrogen flame was quite an experience. Holy smokes! It took me about eight weeks, but I finally got the thing finished. What a project! But we did some neat photochemistry on the cheap... You could have gotten a really fast tan from that lamp -- I rigged up a surplus motor-generator set for the power supply. IIRC, it drew about 5-10 kilowatts.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20

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