“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.
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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 […]
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Two easy DIY recipes for high-temperature cement: one starts from ready-made stove repair cement, and another uses only bulk mineral products.
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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…
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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 […]
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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.
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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]
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