What I learned today

[Euler]

Have you ever tried to melt and work with glass? Me either. I need glass shaped in a fairly specific way and couldn't find any glass-smiths in my area. So I thought, heck...I'll melt glass and pour it in a mold and wait for it to cool and bada-bing.

How would you melt glass?

My solution?

Thermite. So I thought, I'll put broken glass in this cast iron thing, add thermite, wait for the glass to melt and then pour.

Nope. Mostly I got a charred blob of sharp things. Also, my mold was made of clay that wasn't really kilned or anything. Thermite+moisture=bad.

When you add snow and spilt thermite into the above equation, disaster. So what I learned is that there is a reason people don't use thermite when working with glass. sigh.

[SHAFT]

I'm actually in the glass business. We use torches.

[Euler]

would have been useful to know yesterday.

[Stanley Burrell]

This. Is the greatest thread I have ever read.

[Back]

Today I learned that bar-tending can be very lucrative if you just listen.

[Celephais]

You didn't melt glass in HS science class? They made us make all sorts of bent tube shit...

What shape do you need? can you alter an existing glass item? Glass is pretty easy to manipulate if you just heat it up (not thermite hot), blowtorch should be fine.

[Euler]

I want a real thick tube that I can fill with copper wiring. It needs to have like four inch thick sides and a diameter of about 10 inches.