Edisto Island, South Carolina and Alexander Bache's

My wife and I took a trip to Edisto Island, South Carolina this June, camping a couple of miles from the beach in a rented, teardrop camper. The campsite adjoined Botany Bay, a plantation-cum-nature-preserve with gorgeous beach access.

In hiking Botany Bay's grounds, just past the Bleak Hall Ice House, we followed a sign for the Bache monument, neither of us having any idea what the Bache monument was - or how to pronounce Bache. After a fair number of twists, turns, spider webs, and uncertain left and right turns, we came upon a two and a half foot tall, four-sided, low-slope peaked granite monument inscribed with the name Bache and a few other things that meant nothing to us.

Heck, we didn't even take a photo, the monument was so uninteresting and unassuming.

Until we hiked through Edisto Beach State Park the next day, finding ourselves at the education center in the far, western edge of the park. There we found a second Bache monument, thankfully along with educational placards explaining just why that unassuming granite tower was remarkably important and interesting.

I'll start with the informational placards then follow up with my explanation and interpretation.

Field Trip: Hoover Dam

For the first time in a while, my wife and I had the same spring break at our two different school districts. We took advantage and headed west to the warmer climes of Las Vegas. Yes, we headed through a number of casinos (sight-seeing, no gambling for either of us) and the Neon Museum (which is spectacular but could use more money for rebuilding the old signs), but the highlight of the trip - from a material science perspective, anyway - was our visit to and tour of Hoover Dam.

Casting in the forge at UC

First, a mention of thanks to Abby Friend, Princeton High School graduate in the class of 2011, and a current student at the University of Cincinnati in their DAAP (Design, Art, Architecture, Planning) school. An additional mention of thanks to Farron Allen, professor in the DAAP school who allowed me to hang out in 'his' forge for an evening class.

The students had previously made their investments out of ludo, plaster, and silica sand, burying wax sculptures and - in some cases - tiny, plastic doll limbs in their investments and ensuring that their hidden treasures had enough sprues attached for the bronze to find their way to every inch of the creations-to-be. I don't have any photos of that investment process, though you can see the final products in the large, white molds into which the bronze you see below is being poured.

Abby explained that much of the investment is reused - mixed with new plaster and sand to be used for the next set of investments.

On to the casting...

Those are the investments to the right. They just came out of the really large kiln. The bricks were on top of the holes to keep any dust out of there. The green flames to the back were coming out of the methane-fired kiln in which a whole bunch of bronze was melting in a ceramic crucible.

Butte, America (part 1 - Berkley Pit)

I just got back from Butte, Montana for our first ASM Teachers Camp under the Big Sky.

While there, we got to tour a couple of places that might be worth sharing.

On Monday night we took a trolley tour of Butte from a Butte High School history teacher, Chris Fisk. Yes, the Chris Fisk of 'saving a pig from Berkeley Pit' fame. (The tour was phenomenal, by the way. If ever you're in town, check the tours out. It was seriously outstanding.)

This post is going to focus on the portion of the field trip that visited the Berkeley Pit, an abandoned, open-pit mine that was operational from 1955 until 1979. For three years then, pumps kept water out of the Pit, water that would otherwise have filled the Pit and filled the various shaft mines loosely connected to the Pit, an interconnected honeycomb of mines that laced the ground underneath all of Butte.

The Pit as we saw it on 7/21/14 on a nearly windless day.

Then, in 1982 the pumps were turned off, and the Pit began to fill...and fill...and fill with water. The water continues to rise at a rate of eight to ten inches a month, headed for a water treatment plant that has already been built at an elevation of 5410' above sea level, the critical height at which water will start to flow out of the Pit, contaminating the aquifer that is the source of Butte's drinking water. At that point, the water treatment plant will come online and maintain the water at a level just below that critical level...forever. As I write this, the water level in the Pit is 5318.01' (check current level here).

So, to our trip...(I warn you, there are lot and LOTS of photos after the jump.)

Kokomo Opalescent Glass factory tour - 3-26-14

It's spring break, and what better way is there to celebrate than by taking a trip three hours northwest to Kokomo, Indiana to tour the Kokomo Opalescent Glass (KOG) factory?

We (Becky and Lonnie) had seen the videos of glass being poured at KOG and even shown them in the summer camps - including at the University of Indianapolis on the south side of Indy, but we had never made the trek to the far north side to see KOG, a world-famous maker of art glass.

The trip is about three hours each way from Cincinnati, but it's an easy enough three hours with the factory being about forty-five minutes north of the loop interstate around Indy but forty-five minutes on a four-lane highway most of the way.

The factory tour only runs once a day - at 10am, so we set off early and arrived at 9:30 as the tour was actually about to get underway. They had a pre-arranged tour of local school children coming in at 10am and wanted to get the day's open tour of a dozen adults moving before the school children came through.

The tour guide (David, far right, first row under The OP Shop Team) was highly knowledgeable, having working at KOG for three years but having worked with glass for more than thirty years. David took us through the hot shop with its twelve kilns (each replaced once every four months or so, the entire kiln shut down and rebuilt once every twenty-five years, glass heated to 2600 degrees [Fahrenheit, David thought]). We got to see the workers pour a few smaller sheets using the catspaw rollers, producing a gorgeous and heavy texture on one side of the 1/8"-thick glass sheets. The sheets were pushed into an annealing, conveyor-belt over for a forty-minute cool time (far shorter than either of us expected). We didn't take long enough to see 'our' sheets come out the other end, sadly.

The next stop was to the glass blowing room where we saw two blown rondels being made and saw the finished products of the glass blowing shop including some gorgeous paperweights. Never knew that the bubbles in the paperweights (like this) were created by rolling the hot glass in baking soda (2 NaHCO₃ --> Na₂O_(s) + 2 CO_2(g) + H₂O_(l)).

We headed to see the large, glass sheets trimmed with impressive efficiency. Sadly 'our' sheets that we'd seen poured weren't quite out of the annealing process for us to see. We did get to see into the 'rainbow room' where many of the glass sheets are stored. We watched some glass beads be made and wrapped up our tour back in the OP shop.

Check out our pics and vids...

Broken glass gets collected by color to be reused.