Conquering Clear Glass

one material an elusive to me despite numerous attempts has been clear glass in the past I've documented five previous attempts at producing it even going as far it's a travel a West for extra ingredients and help from other youtubers each attempt got me closer and closer but still nothing completely clear that would work for optics over in the background it only took me another 15 attempts to finally figure out the missing ingredients and techniques to finally pull this off all it took was learning how to make soap learning how to make toothpaste and making one more journey out west collect the compound I was initially only interested in as a laundry detergent first the secret ingredient I needed as a flux to meet optically clear glass much more achievable borax this flux was completely off my radar as borosilicate glass is known for its heat resistance and for melting at a higher temperature see the idea of adding it to my glass mixture to lower the melting point didn't even cross my mind but in the end this compound ended up being crucial so to collect it from its natural source I took a trip to the borax capital of the world boron California I'm here at the borax mine in boron the army where they harvest it it's an old Lake that I believe here you can tell they extract it out bring it up and then they sell it use it many industrial purposes on the side here at the Visitor Center they have a appearance of some of the leftovers and let some little visitors come and help themselves so that's what I'm gonna do because for some reason they won't let me down there so there's how I'm gonna get my borax I'm gonna grab a bucket [Music] all right so now should have a variety of different boron containing elements and like a few different items from well to bag a little bit more about this rock itself well then boron I visited a rock expert David Ayer wake up next to a wonderful wife drive a bunch of bitchin cars and I play with rocks can you ask for a better job than that we're in the town of boron right now and these are several different minerals their continued boron yeah these are these are borates and these particular are sodium borate s-- this is borax the native borax and it actually has sort of a wet feeling because it's ten molecules of water and when it dehydrates to being white that most people recognize it being that's actually the mineral tink Alka Knight which is five molecules water this is also borax if you were to break off that edge you can still see here that it is translucent this is what they refer to as red or this actually has high amounts of arsenic in it one of the other sodium borate s-- is kern it-- named after Kern County the county that we're in it was first identified here in boron Kerr Knight is now principally used for making boric acid and this is actually what our Knight crystal looks like these are pretty rare so when you buy a box of borax so is it basically this yeah it'll be basically more of your pentahydrate and so it's your decahydrate reason why boron compounds work good in soap products is it does two things it actually does look lowered the surface tension of the water which means the water makes the clothes a little wetter because that surface tension is lower and it also acts as a mild hydrogen peroxide or so yeah you're actually getting a peroxide bleaching that took place from the borax is what I mostly is in laundry detergent oh no it's actually a very small part it's ten twelve percent of the markets actually for laundry purposes majority of it is in stroll applications everything from computer chips to fiberglass boron compounds are actually used in everything from birth to death you will find it in the glass in your house the glass in your car you will actually find it in the fuel in your gas tank because boron compounds will control the microbes that occur in your fuel it's in your clothes other than just washing the Space Shuttle tiles those were borosilicate they were great at heat dissipation yeah even in your plasma screen TV and your cell phone yeah foreign compounds the benefits of borosilicate glasses it can actually take exceptionally high temperatures a lot of people are familiar with Pyrex or the Pyrex brand yeah if you have Pyrex dishes that was produced during 1960s 1970s boron compounds that was used in that actually all came from Death Valley there was any reason why this area has so much boron compounds well this location that actually was was a lake at one time that was spring fed from the north where the boron compounds came from to feed into that spring yep that would be a nice thing to know too wouldn't it this deposit is rather old the bottom of the pit is around 35 million some people would call that old of course that business I'm in that's actually not overly old we've been mining here since 1927 hence the town boron named after some OB number five an elemental chart and we are the borax capital of the world at least as of right now well borax should hopefully help me make clear glass even also collect a specific variety of this boron compound that has an oddity of not being transparent but instead by acting more like fiber optics this is a boron compound also in the mineral name is you'll excite it's a sodium calcium borate as far as yulik site goes you'll excite occurs throughout the rest of the world the optical grade which is what this is only occurs in boron okay you're not looking through the rock it's projecting the image to the surface of the rock this is you'll excite from boron is a natural occurring fiber optic mineral only here in boron do we have the optical grade variety of you'll excite you will excite from boron is the material at Bell Telephone experimented with back in the late 50s for the fiber optics we have today many industries experimented with the you'll excite first fiber optic properties NASA experimented with it I supplied them with that material so the reason it has that property is because of how the molecule is crystallize that's a good question right there they cannot reproduce you'll excite to do this this is an anomaly more X company tried to regrow you'll excite in the lab they were able to regrow it but they could not get it to have its crystal habit realign you don't know why now back home with a supply of borax let's go through why this compound is so important and why all of my previous attempts have failed first off let's lay out two unique challenges I face sourcing all the wrong ingredients and heating it to the adequate melting temperature a glass maker today we'll just use a premix powder for producing a clear and easy to work with glass but with the unique rules that I attempt to follow on my series I can't just buy the ingredients to make glass and you just source them from nature which is something let's become a bit of a lost art so piecing together the best recipes and the sources of these ingredients and how to remove any impurities from them has always been a challenge then there is a method of heating it forming glass requires some pretty intense heat edit them to range that requires some special and expensive equipment to reach it a gas furnace and glassblowing studio can cost anywhere from eight to twenty grand if not more something a bit about a range for youtuber who only dabbles in glass making for some of my first attempts I was able to get access to one of these furnaces which can reach temperatures up to 2300 degrees Fahrenheit over running these gas-powered furnaces is pretty expensive and getting continued access to them quickly became pretty impossible after that I tried a series of different kiln setups including a recreation of Graham's Forge but without an easy way to regulate and control the temperature these methods were not ideal for making glass then there's the issue that glass tends to require some really long bake time and it's not too safe to leave something like that running with open flame fortunately it was around this time that our channel had picked up a little traction and I could invest a little more money and did some small electric kilns and this is where I could really start narrowing down the science behind this with a gas setup it would take a long time to heat up and I'd have to basically babysit it so I didn't risk burning down the garage but the kiln I could reach high temperatures in as quick as 10 minutes and didn't need to be run outside under constant supervision so I could do a lot a fairly quick test with all these kilns and forges getting to that peak temperature of at least 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit was a challenge in these electric kilns still fall just a little short the slower working temperature is where large challenge comes in what leads to the next topic and where the borax becomes so crucial the flux the flux is any compound added to a glass mix the lower the melting temperature and make it more malleable so it's possible to work with it the first flux I tried to use is potassium carbonate or potash which can be extracted from the ashes of hardwood trees so after much work I extracted the compound by soaking tons of ashes in water draining and boiling off the final solution - you look great on pound that whoever did not yield the best glass so I tried to get and still no luck potash can be used to make glass but most often the preferred compound is sodium carbonate so I figured I could source this and see if I have better luck so I took a trip to the closest natural source of it to meet Wyoming this seemed to work better but it still was falling short with the easy-to-use electric kilns I ran multiple tests using both by naturally source compounds and chemically Pierre purchased ones and learned well the soda ash was able to get me a lot closer completely clear of a free glass was impossible with just these compounds no matter how long I was able to bake it for only when I added the borax that things finally turned out clear looking at the melting points of potash soda ash and borax you can start to see why by using borax the overall melting point of my glass mixture goes down even further allowing it to turn more fluid at the slightly lower temperature and all the bubbles to more easily separate so now knowing a workable recipe for success I just need to prepare all of my compounds and see if I could actually pull this off so I first tried to make glass I thought you just need sand but it actually involves hundreds of different compounds so next I learned about fluxes and other compounds like lime that help stabilize it I kind just threw in all the compounds without purifying them and that ended up with pretty opaque results the thing I learned is that in order to make clear glass you first gotta learn how to make soap you know learn how to make toothpaste you gotta learn how to make laundry detergent so in making those other items I learned how to process these other compounds into their pure elements and these come from all around the country got the sand and limestone from here in Minnesota I got the soda ash from Lake in Wyoming but salt from a salt mine and Utah gypsum crystals are from Arizona and the borax is from California a little bit of all over from the US and the sands when I did the two-face actually did a bunch of extra so I have some left over silicon dioxide which is just like straight quartz no impurities [Music] you tell there's a huge difference in color so that right there itself is a pretty good sign so with these six compounds I can hopefully finally make clear glass all right so let's start purifying some chemicals first I took the limestone and baked it at over 1600 degrees Fahrenheit during the calcium carbonate inside of it and did calcium oxide which is water-soluble and forms a very caustic calcium hydroxide and we are it some confess but all the impurities in the stone should precipitate out as solids and could be strained out I can then react my soda ash of the calcium hydroxide to form a dissolved lye some impurity is from the soda ash should stay solid and can also be straightened out now both the calcium hydroxide and lye will slowly react with co2 in the air and turn back into the calcium carbonate and soda ash that I'm after speed it up a bubble a bit of co2 which will reduce both of them to their last caustic version the rest of the compounds I crushed and dissolve into water then strain them to remove any solid impurities and left them to dry once dried I measured them out and combined them into a ball mill to evenly mix and pulverize them now to melt it into glass let it run overnight hopefully have some clear glass from here it took several attempts experimenting to find an ideal setup to poured onto to form a nice pocket I don't think that was yet still one last major hurdle I had to overcome Annie leaned it on its own glass will cool unevenly from the surface in which would cause tendon to form within it and eventually cause it to shatter so to solve that you have to slowly cool it over several hours in up two days the exact rate depends on the thickness of the glass and his composition since I made my glass myself this was a guessing game an attempt after attempt it kept cracking on me the good news is I can throw the glass back into the crucible and remelt it again and each time I did this it seemed to get clearer with more and more bubbles removed till I finally had a very clear solid piece to work with [Music] okay took like 15 20 tries but I finally have some clear glass well actually it broke in half I already put that other piece rushed a little bit trying to flip it because it's starting to slump and end up cracking in half but both halves are actually clear glass took like 15 to 20 tries but I'm gonna have it's got slight discolorations like greenness to it so there might be still be some impurities or might be caused by the borax I'm not sure but this is definitely clear glass I feel pretty confident I can actually make some lenses out of this finally got it now with both optical grey glass and a metal produced from scratch I can move forward on my camera project make a camera lens next if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you enjoy these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 1,227,868

Rating: 4.9324441 out of 5

Keywords: HTME, DIY, Fun, Smart, Learn, Teach, Maker, History, Science, Innovator, Education, Educational, School, Invention, Agriculture, Textiles, Industry, Technology, glass, borax, melt, sand, quartz, chemistry, clear, transparent, opaque, glassblowing, gypsum, forge, obsidian, soda ash, boron, ulexite, potash, primitive, kiln, california, lime, soda

Id: B7lgo1LbpCs

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Kheten]

That dude with the red shirt that owned a Rock store really knew his shit. That hair tho.

[u/zyrs86]

that fucking one guys hair hahaha

[u/HeavyShockWave]

I love going into depth about a small niche field which has no relevance to my life

honestly fascinating how every field just has a depth that cannot be reached unless you are dedicated to that field

[u/tekni5]

I've been watching How To Make Everything for a while and it's entertaining and even educational at times. However it can also be very infuriating because Andy doesn't always do things properly, especially when you get containers, pouring and mixing. It just makes me mad to watch him fumble around, get everything dirty, spill stuff, use the wrong size and have the result look so bad.

I've started calling him half-ass Andy.

This video wasn't as bad as his other ones.

[u/[deleted]]

This guy's rules are all weird. How come he lets himself use modern technology for some things, but for others he has to go into the jungle to collect everything?

[u/_-Stoop-Kid-_]

Mining your own boron to use as flux in glass making?

Weird flux but okay..