I have become very interested in experimenting with lava formulas. I haven't started yet, but I am very curious, and it would be great to make my own colors combinations. Any suggestions and comments are welcome,

Thanks!

Keith

Ok, I am spending way too much $$$$$ to buy lamps that companies that don't give a darn have made. Plus all they make are limited colors. So, I have resolved to.....(drum roll here please)......make my own lamps!!! I am not exactly sure of the formulas. But some looking at some of the crappy new lamps that I have bought reciently, I wonder, "Could I really do much worse?" So.... I am OFF TO CREATE LAMPS!!!!!!!! Hereeeee I come to save the LAVAAAAA!!!!!
Bert
6-ft-under.com

Ok guys! Let’s make a lava lamp with our hands!!!!

Unfortunately I’m somewhat (or too much) distracted man and didn’t saw the Lava Lamp Scientists group before open a new topic at the forum… The idea was just incentive other people to build a lava lamp by themselves and by first I wrote about a text describing how to make cheap and accurate densimeter. Please go to the forum and look the topic Building your lava lamp: how to make the life easier?
If you are interested on the device, please let me know.

Kindest regards,

João Roberto Gabbardo

Ok guys, on the saturday I removed the ooze from my damaged lava lamp and cleaned the bottle. On the monday I ordered the percloroethilene to make my own lava lamp. After all, to be a true Lava Lamp Scientist one should make something scientific related to lava lamps!!!

As you can expect I want tell my results/conclusions to the rest of the members, .

Kindest regards,

João Roberto Gabbardo

Well, I’m a bit (perhaps very disappointed) with this group! No one replied or even commented my last post! It seems like I’m the only crazy guy to propose make a lava lamp in a group that is called Lava Lamp Scientists!!!!! Well I will not quit the idea to make my own lava lamp and to do it I ordered the perchloroetylene, purchased the ethylene glycol, 2 rules and a square - this last was intended to cut and get a small clear plastic sheet - but it looked so pretty and I decide not destroy it! Fortunately I found 2 pieces of a plastic like Plexiglas measuring about 4 x 10 cm close to the dimensions suggested on an article translated from Portuguese to English by me entitled “Making a didactic densimeter”. As you can imagine, the rules are also used on the device. I need purchase some other pieces to build the device and want do it this week. Also I need purchase the wax and the die. Anyway, the day where I will start the experiments is coming soon!

Kindest regards,

João Roberto Gabbardo

Now I'm almost ready to start own lava lamp! The perchloroethylene is in my hands!!!! I need some other components like the pure salt - it was ordered and probably will arrive this next monday - and the wax. I'm really filled of expectancy.

Hi everyone! Is this a new group? I have been making my own lava for a while now. I've done a lot of experimenting and have had some good luck, but I would sure love to hear some other recipes! I originally used the recipe that consisted of equal parts of mineral oil, parrafin wax and perk. I have sense dropped the mineral oil and lessened the perk and added vaseline. I'm having more luck without mineral oil.

Hello Jennifer!

Finally someone in this forum posted a message telling his experiences and I think that talk with you very interesting since I’m almost ready to make my own experiences with lava lamps! At first I want follow the recipe at oozing goo because it seems to be very trustable especially after see a video at YouTube named “How to make a real lava lamp”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAJG8jh2SJA
Please look that and you will agree with me.

Kindest regards,

João Roberto Gabbardo

Jennifer, I agree. I think the petroleum jelly is much better, but I don't use equal parts. I use about two parts wax to one part petroleum jelly. My wax was sort of runny, and stuck to the sides easier with that much vaseline. I think it's because the way the vaseline sort of made it "thinner" like it could more easily leave a residue on the glass. With the recipe i use now, the wax gets on the side sometimes, but it comes off on it's own and doesn't leave a residue to stick back to later.

Does anyone know if internal pressure is really necessary in a lamp? I always seal mine when they're hot, so there is very little, and they seem to work fine... I'm only wondering because I have this large rectangular container with a sealing lid, but it's like a big gasket-like thing. It doesn't clamp down, so I couldn't have any pressure in it, but it would make a really cool lamp, so I was curious if anyone knew.

Has anyone had any luck with Epsom salt? I'm just wondering if it is a good substitute for canning/pickling salts.

I prefer Pickling Salt over Epsom Salt, but both work. Pickling Salt usually give a 'quicker' movement, Epsom Salt seems to be slower, and the goo gobs are usually rounder. You can also try Glycerin, it works FANTASTIC. I've never seen a lamp work better.

Thanks, I ended up just going out and buying the pickling salt. For $2 I figured it was worth it! I used the glycerin solution as well which was keeping the liquid crystal clear and the wax off the glass. But then added DAWN brand soap and got crazy activity and white ppt appeared:( Now I'm trying Miracle Soap added in solution.

Try Polyethylene Glycol (Miralax or a generic brand is usually 15 bucks at Walmart, but a little goes a long way). It's a superior Surfactant, it not only changes the surface tension of the water it also increases the gravity.

Technically I guess you could make a lamp with only Polyethylene Glycol, it should flow very well. Maybe that will be my next experiment.

I've never made a lamp using glycerin rather than salt. I must try. I use epsom salt always and I do end up adding a lot. I have some homemade wax that I'm trying to get to work in a meditteranean and I'm having 0 luck. I sure wish Spencer's would get some GOOD lamps in for a transplant!

Anyone have any luck making Rubbing Alcohol lamps? I've made several, and they are surprisingly easy.If anyone is interested I'm happy to share info.

I just got a lamp flowing with just the Poly Glycol. I found that soap was still needed to counter act the surface tension issue of PG alone. It flows slow and round blobs. Different flow than the salt solution. I'll post pics in a few days if it still looks good.

Conclusion: It will flow, so it is a very mellow motion lamp. But not an improvement over relying on the salt.

You'd have better flow if you mixed the PEG with Pickling Salt. The Salt makes it flow fast, the PEG can then be seen visibly affecting as it 'zooms' about.

With 3 lava lamps under my belt in under 2 weeks, I think I'll fit right in ;-)

Hey Magic Lamp-post pics! Is your blue/white one you did? Looks great! What kind of wax did you use?

Nevermind-I see them on your profile. I love "black beauty". You must share some of your techniques. Your wax looks more opaque than I get mine, I'm always looking for ways to make it more opaque!

I love that you are naming them, like works of art! I do feel like this is such a neat creative outlet! Screw sculpting and painting!

Ah yeah.."Casper" was my first homemade lava lamp, made to replace the wax and fluid of a defective chinese one. I initially intended it to be blue on blue, so I got some tealights from LIDL which were blue...only to discover they were mostly white with just a flake of blue on the visible side. So yeah, in the end it turned out blue/white. The wax is just tealight wax, mostly white with a speck of blue and a solid pink one mixed in.

Just a tip I felt like sharing with fellow lava lamp scientists: when making my homemade lamps: while the chinese one had its own coil, one of the challenges I faced was finding a way to provide the other two with their own coils....and hardware stores don't sell ready-made springs, apparently. I tried with electrical copper wire and metallic dish scrubbing brushes, but they didn't work well (too soft?).

Some pages on the internet suggested twisting your own coils from iron/inox steel, but I found an acceptable solution with materials I had at home: I just daisy chained some inox paper clips together (use your imaginarion, you can just make a girdle or form a flower-like structure, just threw them in the lamp and twisted it around so they "open up" on the lamp's bottom. They work great and break the wax just fine.

About the wax I used: I found it best to use high-quality candles with all-solid color wax. They cost more, but they are worth it, for they have great opaqueness and color consistency compared to white waxes with just external color coatings. The black wax comes from such candles. It occasionally shows bubbles or some blobs get too transparent, but otherwise it has a near pro-grade opaqueness. I will post the candle brand if I find it. They were quite expensive though, like 3 Euro for just two candles, enough for 1 lamp.

Wow, great idea! I have found springs at my local Ace hardware, but they are so stiff and thick that I have to get my husband to fix them for me and then still, he usually scrapes up his fingers.
Thanks!

I was looking again the coil from my damaged (and disassembled) lava lamp and it is made by 0.4mm diameter stainless steel. The coil serves to distribute the heat in the bottom of the bottle and stainless steel is far to be the best material to do so. The heat conductivity of stainless steel is less than copper (best) and aluminum and the main reason of use stainless steel is by its greater mechanical strength compared to the other two later materials. Copper and aluminum are too much soft and is easy to deform them permanently. On the other hand a coil made by a thin stainless steel wire is sufficient hard to be squeezed and inserted in the bottle opening and returns to the previous shape. Here in Brazil we can found thin stainless steel wire in crafts material store and I bet you can found it easily there. Make a coil using a thin stainless is very easy and you don’t need any kind of special tool: just wrap firmly the wire in a rod with the diameter you want make the coil. You can use a Philips screw driver, for example. But why a Philips screw driver? Well, if you use a regular screw driver surely you will not be able to remove the coil from it due to the flared extremity!

Best regards,

João Roberto Gabbardo

I don't know if the coil has -or even if it's supposed to have- any serious effect on spreading the heat: after all, it has too small a mass, too little surface area and total thermal capacity compared to the fluid, wax and even the glass surrounding it.

I know it has an important role in breaking up the surface tension of the blobs though: the soft copper and dish-scrubbing wire mesh just let the wax "flow" through them without breaking it, and the wax kept itself in one big blob. The hard steel paper clip OTOH resulted in the wax breaking up almost immediately on contact.

Then again....it might be that due to its being metallic and closest to the lamp's filament, it might have a localized high temperature gradient (although the surrounding fluid and wax would cool it almost immediately). I wonder how a lamp where the coil was a direct heating element would perform....

I must admit that my experience with lava lamps is very little; after all I only had one lava lamp! In spite of it worked well, the clear liquid was clouded. Probably the lamp was packaged warm and immediately shipped. I made several experiences intending to repair the lamp (but letting the original ooze) and discovered that if you shake the lamp when it is warm the ooze mix with the water at some extent clouding it. In my thoughts the coil seems to spread the heat in ooze like the heatsinks used in electronic components.
If you consider a lava lamp operating in such way like ever having enough quantity of ooze in the bottom to let the coil completely covered, how it will act to break the ooze surface tension? In this situation the blobs will emerge due to the heating from the top of the accumulated ooze or a quantity of ooze is splashed forming a blob when one cool blob falls in the accumulated ooze.
Anyway the metallic coil is better to transfer the heat to the ooze than the glass but as you pointed, due to its low size and mass how much it takes part in the working of the lamp?
I think that if the ooze was heated directly by the coil it would be work in the same way but with a increasing of the energy efficiency. In the actual lamps the incandescent light bulb serves to furnish heat and light with low efficiency since the heating happens mainly by radiated heat. Using an element like the coil to directly heat the fluids will save energy and would allows use LEDs as light sources that are much more efficient than incandescent lamps.

Best regards,

João Roberto Gabbardo

Well, the ooze is much softer than the coil and touching it disrupts the blobs' surface. If there was just enough wax for one blob in the whole lamp, then yeah, a coil wouldn't be necessary: the same blob would keep going up and down due to heat gradients. If you have multiple blobs though, when you have a malfunctioning coil (e.g. too thick, too porous, too dirty) then they tend to stay separated, like many baloons, and don't recombine.

Consider e.g. what happens at the top of the lamp, where blobs touch for long times but very seldom break up and mix (only if the lamp overheats they connect away from the coil) or what happens to "in flight" blobs that touch: they just bounce off each other.

By the time the lamp heats up enough as a whole to start the cycle, the coil can't make any difference (and for that matter, it can't be hotter than its surroundings: its temperature will be dominated by the fluid and wax around it). Now, if you had a charcoal black disk directly facing the lightbulb, even several centimeters inside the bottle...then yeah, that would localize some extra heat due to irradiation, but still no big deal.

When I was making experiments with my damaged lamp I noticed one of the effects you are describing: the ozze was accumulated in the top and from time to time a big blob (due to the cooling of part of accumulated ooze) was falling. This problem was caused by an incorrect density balance between the ooze and water not by overheating: the lamp has a dimmer and was possible control the heating and was impossible make the lamp works properly adjusting the heating, either the ooze stays at the bottom or was accumulating in the top.

Of course the coil is not responsible by itself to break the blobs, the heat also takes a important place in the game and again I was able to notice it in my experiments. When the rising (and hot) blobs touched the ooze in the top (more cooled) they didn’t joined to it immediately, only after transfer sufficient heat to disrupt the contact surface between them.

So we agree in the point when the coil is completely covered by ooze: it doesn’t play an important role in the surface tension breaking mechanism, here the heating makes the hard job.

You are sure. Place one black disk inside the bottle is not worthwhile. One interesting idea is use the same principle of induction owens. I think you know a kind of electric owens without heating resistances where the pans are placed directly over the ‘heating plate’ and the pans heat the food like a magic. Of course there are no magic in the process, the pans must be metallic made and below the heating plate are coils where a strong alternating current with high frequency flows creating a intense alternating magnetic field. This field induces closed current loops in the bottom of the pans and the heating is produced by resistance loss in the metal. The same phenomena takes place in the iron core of transformers and the current lops are also called ‘eddy currents’ or ‘Foucault currents’. The cores of transformers (also the stator and rotor in the motors) are laminated just to reduce the losses by these current loops. Why not try to use the same principle with lava lamps heating the lava directly by the coil in the same way of induction owens? The lamp should be replaced by LEDs and even the LEDs who change the color automatically could be used creating interesting light effects. This is only a suggestion, after all the efficiency of such arrangement can be lower than use a incandescent lamp!

I should rephrase my statement in clearer wording: the coil does play an important role in breaking the surface tension, but it does not do so by concentrating heat, and it has no significant heat localization effect whatsoever. It works purely by mechanical action. A coil-less lamp would result in one big blob that seldom breaks and seldom reconnects and would be, overall, pretty boring to watch.

During my own experiments, I found out that using too soft materials for the coil, like e.g. copper wire or metal dish brush filaments, didn't result in proper breaking of blobs (even though they would concentrate more heat than a polished stainless steel coil, due to them being darker and less reflective): the blobs just pushed the metal aside without breaking.

However even by using some paper clips joined in a girdle or a coil of 1mm solder wire, resulted in immediate breakage upon contact, even when the coil was mostly "submerged" in wax.

As for the other concept, an induction-heated lava lamp, it would sure be possible if you got a suitable coil inside it, the only problem would be that such a coil would be very visible and much bulkier than the simple tension-breaking coils. It would have to be made of proper, corrosion-resistant materials, and also have constant heating/resistance properties over time.

The lamp mechanism would have to be replaced with a powered "emitter" induction coil, and that coil would have to be as close as possible to the one inside the lamp (the "receiver") in order to avoid losses, and you would also have to provide separate lighting through something small and powerful enough to fit between the two coils without emitting too much (or any) heat itself (LEDs?).

The main problem would be power efficiency (power would be lost the farthest the two coils are, and some minimum distance is inevitable. It's one thing using an inductive charger for something that uses 3-5 W (like e.g. a rechargeable toothbrush or computer mouse) and for something in the 40-50W range, plus having to provide for separate lightning.

Lava Lamps are one of those applications where incandescent lamps provide the ideal mix of heat and light in one device: no reason to make it any more complex just for the sake of it ;-)

Also, I meant that when the lamp overheats and the temperature is pretty much uniform everywhere, there are no more gradients that could make the blobs move, that's why they wax usually collects on top after protracted operation, even in otherwise carefully balanced lamps, even commercial-grade ones: unless the shape of the globe and the lamp's power are calibrated as to ensure that there will always be a large enough temperature gradient across a wide range of temperatures (which is just impossible without an adjustable power heat source and/or a variable cooling lamp top), the lamp will "stall" at some point and you will have to power it off.