My adventures with goo kits

I've made 2 custom globes so far! The first one I had to redo 3 times, and might actually have to remake again, but the second one is doing great so far. :)

Here they both are, in full flow.

Erin, you were right. The wax did indeed become more translucent. I didn't see the orange one look totally transparent like that, but it must have. Whelp, I'm out of globes for a while, but I'll most definitely be trying my hand at this again in the future! Metallic is next on the agenda. :)

...I mean metallic that actually works. LOL!

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Permalink Reply by Loren on March 2, 2012 at 12:17am

Whelp, the blue ice globe is having problems. Why so many bubbles? the other kits I've done haven't had nearly so many bubbles. I know each lamp has its own unique character & all, but this thing it weird. You know how some lamps have a certain "theme" to the kind of formations they produce? Well this one is ice, jellyfish, tentacles, and crab legs.

Yup.

Which is fine, in spite of way too many bubbles, and a flow that is stringy at times, but...at one point all of the wax was broken into tiny beads that wouldn't go back together again, I know that magma tower goo kits should be used with a dimmer switch, but I haven't made a dimmer box yet. In the meantime, I only run my kit jobs at full flow for an hour at the most. So 4-5 hours at a time, total. That still happened to the blue globe though, so I don't think it was overheating.

Here's what I think it is. Now granted, this globe is a larger size from the other project I worked on, but in spite of that, and the whole individual character of each lamp thing, there's really no reason why this globe should behave so strangely.

...except for the marker I used to color the water. :-/ I had read that crayola washable markers were good to use, but I should have looked more closely to this old marker from my jar...it's a color-changing crayola marker. I'm pretty sure the chemicals in that ink are doing something funky to the wax. I'm going to let it cycle through a few more times to see if everything meshes eventually, but I might have to redo THAT one, as well!

Sigh...

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Permalink Reply by Tim Gill on March 3, 2012 at 2:09pm

Firstly well done with the goo kit they look good.

About the bubbly wax - how much surf did you add if there is too much surf then these could be causing, since you used Crayola marker to dye the water then this could be the problem. Try using Mc Cormicks food dye as this has been used before by people hear and they say that it work well.

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Permalink Reply by Loren on March 3, 2012 at 2:14pm

Thank you! :)

I finally wound up remaking that blue one.

About 2 hours after you turn it on, all of the wax breaks into little beads, and won't go back together.

Now I like it a lot better...the wax is better, and the water is better.

Only problem now is that the coil is surrounded by water at the bottom of the bottle! The coil is just not meshing with the wax at all this time. :( Does anybody have any ideas how I can fix that? I've run the lamp three times, it just seems to be getting worse. :( the flow is completely broken unless I can fix this!