OLD Time Member Returns to the Goo...

[Bob pasqual]

Hey, ya'll. It's been a while since I was involved with lava lamps. Been a longer while since I was involved on this forum. Think I ran by the highly original monicker of "Lava" about 12-15 years back. I actually acquired my second lamp by winning a poetry contest they held on the forum back in the day.I had a lot of time on my hands in middle school and spent a while perfecting my custom goo formulas and sharing them on this forum. Couldn't find any of those ancient threads, but I still have about 4-5 liquor bottles on my shelf full of all sorts of manner of petroleum and isopropyl mixtures. Still have the knowledge i learned about those as well. This brings me to the point of my post - how can the well established lava company not afford the R&D to produce a lamp of half the quality a kid with a 10$ budget could?

I remember when the average lamp was going for about $30 a pop, so when I saw a whole stack of white and blue lamps at Wal-Mart last week for 10$, I figured I might as well ad that color to my collection. The price couldn't be beat.

I might have been wrong about beating the price, but you get what you pay for. Sad to see the Original American brand cheapening out their quality like that. First off, I noticed the cheap sparkley paint covering up who knows what sort of metal base. Is aluminum really that expensive? And the base is obtuse and bent, especially where the cord enters. Also, when did they figure out how to half produce a lamp that could run on a 25W bulb? Guess they got that super low temperature formula back when they came out with those mini's. But my mini flows well, this thing flows, but as a sort of froth - tons of liquid bubbles in the goo. It reminds me of flowing honey comb or something, not that smooth, gooey jell you used to get. Anyways, just had to rant some. Hope everybody is doing well and I can manage to contribute anything worthwhile to the forum.

[Katie]

It's cool that you were smart and could perfect your own formulas at a young age. I just got back into lava lamps after not buying a new one since 2005. I was shocked when I made a trip to Spencer's and saw how cloudy and awful they are now. I bought a Spongebob lamp from 2010 on ebay. Besides having to change the cloudy water, I find that the 25w formula doesn't get bubbles in it the way my old Midnights did with the 40W. I'm buying my first Colormax so we'll see how the lava flows on that. 

Welcome back!

[Jonas Clark-Elliott]

Were you the guy who started the 70%/90% isopropyl formula idea? If so, I experimented with that, and managed to get a few neat things. I was on back then, too. Welcome back!