Comments | corivax: in which there is fire!

corivax

in which there is fire!

Oct 30, 2006 23:28

Five minutes before the housewarming, it was an unmitigated disaster. We had trouble getting the regulator on our last-minute oxygen tank, cooking half the food we wanted to, the firebrick for the furnace had cracked, the copper ore was lost in the mail, the interplanetary magnetic field chose to deny us the auroras we'd been hoping to show our ( Read more... )

mischeif, metalwork, public, city of shadows, fire, photos

Comments 28

Hee! caladri October 30 2006, 23:38:22 UTC

Fwoom! Hooray for housewarming! We pulled it off! :)

dymaxion October 31 2006, 01:22:19 UTC

Pretty!

corivax November 7 2006, 18:38:49 UTC

Would you like to come over and work on glass sometime?

Also, are you still in Boston? I didn't do your introduction while I was at conference, but if you're still there, I'll do it now.

dymaxion November 8 2006, 05:58:34 UTC

Yeah, that'd be fun. We (sadly) don't have any real torches at the lab now. I've got my welding kit, but the fire department wanted $216 a year for a hot shop permit to let us keep tanks around, so they went back to PraxAir.

I am still in Boston, but I work all day tomorrow and fly out in the afternoon. I'll be back out here again in a few weeks, so maybe next time, depending on how long I'm out here for.

sickyprincess October 31 2006, 01:56:15 UTC

That is an incredibly fantastic view. I'm so jealous. :)

vixyish October 31 2006, 03:10:21 UTC

Bricky things!

randomdreams October 31 2006, 04:17:55 UTC

Are you using magnesium oxide firebricks, the ones you can score and notch with, well, your fingers? That's what I've built most of my stuff with, and it's great, but my ex-gf's glass kiln, gloryhole, and crucible furnace are all done using something that's nearly as hard as conventional bricks, and stands up to tremendous abuse. I'd like to find those and start working with them: rebuild the annealing kiln around them, for instance. (I'm sure they're much harder to work with, but I bet a tile saw would do it.) They stand up to white heat, too, apparently ( ... )

caladri October 31 2006, 05:11:02 UTC

We were using the stuff that comes apart at finger tip. We've considered an oxygen concentrator but were concerned about our startup costs. We'll probably get one in the not-too-distant future, but spent way too much in way too short a time as it was :) We're also not going through it at a very high clip, yet. We started doing some glassblowing before the tank ran out, though, and I suspect if we get further into that at all we'll need a concentrator :)

randomdreams November 1 2006, 04:33:28 UTC

I know some people that (somehow) use both a tank and a concentrator: the concentrator handles small/mid flame and the tank fills in when you really need a bundle of flame. My torch is definitely a two-concentrator machine, with a nozzle 20mm in diameter, but I think I could recoup the investment pretty quickly.

We need more research on firebricks.