I've said it before that I'm not much of a DIY-er, so I'm not likely to make my own cement blocks to build anything, but I like the idea of trying this as a project with my students to balance strength/weight/cost in a building material.
The short version of the above video is that a version of aircrete can be made with xanthan gum, rubbing alcohol, water, dish soap, and cement with some vigorous mixing (a kitchen blender, a drill with a drywall mud attachment, or a smallish cement mixer).
We've seen NightHawkInLight around these parts before - or at least we've heard his voice.
In this video, he posits a few simple rules for building with cardboard...
This video needs a massive - Don't Try This at Home - disclaimer.
That's in spite of the fact that the entire video is telling you how you can exactly do that - melt metal at home.
The procedure is interesting...
Barnaby Dixon is an impressive puppeteer that I first heard about probably ten years ago. If you haven't checked out some of his work, do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes there first.
In this instructional video, Barnaby explains how he uses a thermoplastic polymer - a polymer that becomes flexible when it's heated above some temperature but is rigid below that same temperature. It's a great example of the polymer's glass transition phase change. Because polymers are mixtures, they don't necessarily have definite melting temperatures as pure substances like elements or compounds do. Instead they have ranges of temperatures during which they aren't quite solid or liquid but are flexible and moldable - think of hot glass being shapeable but not liquid.
I have some of this at school. It used to be available from Educational Innovations. That's where I bought it, but they sadly don't carry it anymore. Of course, just about anything is available at Amazon if you search for pcl moldeable plastic.
"All you need to do is melt some sugar."
Yeah, there's a lot more than that involved in making sugar glass.
You need to make sure the 'glass' remains amorphous so it stays translucent - which is is a little tougher than it seems.
And the sugar shouldn't actually be sucrose but rather isomalt.
...and the stuff you make isn't exactly safe to break across a friend's head.
Not a lot of science presented in that first video, so let's try another one.
As always, be careful out there, folks. This experiment does involve running electricity through a solution.
This process does seem to result in some really pretty crystals.
And I'll admit that I kind of enjoy the simple, non-mugging style that the Backyard Scientist has gotten away from over time.
So, a bit of a story...
I was watching this video on trying to build 3d printed objects by using half layer offsets...
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| 5:38 in the above video |
A few years back I took a workshop from the American Ceramic Society and got a free Materials Science Classroom Kit.
The workshop was a bit of a bust because of a minor snowstorm that kind of cancelled the workshop even though half the participants still showed up, and the presenters did a game job of presenting the workshop as best they could with their limited staff and attendees.
In case you'd thought about getting this kit or taking the workshop, I thought I'd run through what you get for $249 (seriously, that's the price as of my posting of this info.)
The box contains...
"The lessons are some of the most well-written lessons I’ve seen in the industry. They are truly great and valuable for all science teachers!"
In our material science class at Princeton - and in most of the matsci classes that originated from the ASM summer camps, I would imagine - we grow copper (II) sulfate crystals from solution.
It's a fairly easy lab to do, and the students have a high success rate.
For most students, that crystal growing experience is an end, but for others it's just a beginning, a taste of a much richer world of crystal growth.
For those students, crystalverse would be a great resource as it provides instructions for the diy crystal farmer whether they want to grow crystals of copper acetate, monoammonium phosphate, sucrose, alum, sodium chloride, potassium ferrioxalate, or even pyramidal crystals of sodium chloride.
In every case, the procedure is largely the same - make a solution, let the solution cool and evaporate to form seed crystals, continue to let the solution evaporate to grow the seed crystals larger. The great things about the crystalverse website is that it has loads of tips and faqs to help you troubleshoot your growing.
You can get a way cheaper heat gun from Harbor Freight if you need one.
This project is just a different application of our in-class demonstration of inflating a milk jug using that same heat gun, but here once the HDPE jug is softened, it gets molded around a somewhat-heat-resistant skull and cooled to hold that new shape
Sound like a fun idea - and very appropriate for the spooky season that we find ourselves in.
I don't know, man.
I assume the TheCrafsMan isn't really a felt puppet with a bad soul patch and an oddly affected, slow-paced, Cajun accent.
Then again, in my brief research of TheCrafsMan I can't find anything to say that he isn't that puppet somehow magically brought to life like a golem.
His projects a decently involved, however, so unless you've been doing some injection molding already, you - like me - might not be ready to step right up to this level of crafsing.
Last week I posted a couple of videos from these guys and commented that their set-up looked a little advanced for me.
The above video is a lot more my speed, true beginner stuff there. That's closer to the skills and tools that I have.
And if I scale this up, here's a video on how I might want to organize things...if...
I love this process...melting (technically it's softening not melting) HDPE on a panini press between parchment paper (they call it greaseproof, but that's parchment in the US) and pressing it into a mold looks like something I could maybe actually do.
So I started collecting lids since the beginning of the year. I don't have nearly enough, though, so I'm going to have to expand my collecting efforts.
Clearly their processing has gotten much, much fancier as the jewelry making video shows. They're on to injection molding, oven melting, and machined aluminum molds.
I'm thinking I'm a ways away from that, but I want to try this next year with my students.
I am not at all surprised that Magic Erasers aren't anything more than microporous, abrasive melamine.
I'm kind of impressed at the Mr Clean folks for figuring out a way to market a very plain material to us as being a 'magic' cleaning product (and for folks who make and buy cheaper versions).
I'm less impressed with The King of Random's successors and their stupid experiments with Magic Erasers or idiots polishing their teeth (seriously) with Magic Erasers.
I did wish there was a little more science explanation of the material, so I turned to the gaming community...as you do, of course.
I remember going out to eat with my parents at a fancy restaurant in Louisville and putting my plastic straw into the flame of the candle on the table.
I got reprimanded pretty quickly because - as I vaguely remember - burning plastic causes cancer. That much my parents did have correct.
Apparently, though, if you stop just short of burning the plastic and instead just melt the outer layer, you can make that plastic look like new.
From Newsweek, "[t]his torch is melting away the oxidized top layer, allowing fresh red plastic to flow across the surface."
Look pretty much right to me.
3 Point Bend Test Report by phschemguy on Scribd
In the spring of 2015, Bob Hanlin, one of the ASM master teachers and a professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, came to our spring training with a project that some of his students had developed. It was a three-point beam tester made on the cheap and designed to be cheaply made by high school teachers to more accurately and repeatedly test the cement composite beams that we make as part of the material science curriculum.
Bob had tasked his students with the following requirements, as found on page three of their final report - embedded above...
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| Source - UMKC website |
