“Geopolymers” have been called “super cements.” They are commonly made in academic labs, but so far I haven’t found a good DIY prep for hands-on learners. I’ve run down a couple of sources and compiled a (still untested) procedure for making small geopolymer stone objects in the garage. Comments welcome.
NYC Resistor members recently spent an evening playing around with resin: For today’s #hackfriday at NYC Resistor a bunch of us were inspired by Junior and ScribbleJ‘s 3D printing projects and experimented with UV curing resin using a DLP projector. We had some JMP UV stamp resin, although it didn’t cure solid with the normal […]
Two easy DIY recipes for high-temperature cement: one starts from ready-made stove repair cement, and another uses only bulk mineral products.
During April, we are spotlighting one of humanity’s oldest, cheapest, and most commonly-used building materials (Also, surprisingly, one of its most poorly understood.) Speaking generally, concrete is a mixture of three components: aggregate, cement, and water. The aggregate can be gravel, sand, glass, plastic, chunks of old concrete, or pretty much any other solid filler. Concrete’s characteristic transformation…
Almost two years ago to the day I wrote a post about how much I wanted to see a reaction of the type called “explosive polymerization.” That phrase appears here and there on hazard warnings for certain compounds and in the general context of chemical safety, but I could find little online info about exactly […]
The little metal connectors and plastic tubes that chemistry students sometimes use to make chemical models can also be used to make interesting geometric models.
If you’d like to take a crack at anodizing your titanium camping gear, try submerging it in Coca-Cola and running 20v-100v through across it. This can be achieved using 9v batteries and a little patience. Depending on the voltage applied, you can transition between Bronze, Blue, Light blue, Yellowish, Purple, Cyan, and Green. [via hackaday]
