Building a 4' Tower Lamp - advice welcome

[Todd]

Greetings!   I've made some progress on my 4' tall tower lava lamp project.  The base is done, glass vase obtained (nice thick walls), and coupling is done - very secure.   I'm getting ready to mount the 200W spot light (on a dimmer - we will be going at this slowly) in the base and am looking for advice on space between the top of the bulb and the bottom of the glass floor.  In my Magma 3' tower the space is less than 1/2", but that's a pro built lamp with the special low expansion glass, and mine is just normal blown glass.    So, I was thinking an inch, or even two, to lessen the thermal gradients, but wonder if I'll end up struggling to get enough heat to warm up the whole column (5 gallons).

Advice and suggestions welcome!

Todd

[Mark Golebiowski]

Hi Todd,

To get it flowing much faster scoop out or siphon out some of the water and bring it to a boil and pour it back in. It will get to 110 in no time. Much faster than waiting all those hours

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[Mattgyver92]

Already got the borosilicate. Hoping it's good enough to take the heat. I'm going to start with a 150W heat lamp. I can get a 250W if it's not enough. Still designing the top, bottom, and stand. Concerned about weight if I make concrete molds, but I might be able to make the walls a little thinner. Maybe.

Again, your tower looks spectacular. I look forward to starting the Titan this summer!

Todd said:

Erupted around three hours, and then the column slowly compressed down as the bottom softened over the next four hours.

Globs finally start going up and down at around seven hours, and within an hour of that the tower was at full flow.  The wax that Claude J provided worked great, no adjustment needed to get huge snakes and wild collisions! 
 
Left on its own in my 65 degree basement, it takes about 12 hours to get to full flow. Top tower temp at full flow then is around 110 F.

Good luck with your own project!  (I HIGHLY recommend avoiding the tempting glass vase path (and disaster it likely leads to) and spend the $$ on borosilicate. 

Todd

[Claude J]

An aquarium heater would be more practical
Mark Golebiowski said:

Hi Todd,

To get it flowing much faster scoop out or siphon out some of the water and bring it to a boil and pour it back in. It will get to 110 in no time. Much faster than waiting all those hours

TRANSLATE with x

English

Arabic	Hebrew	Polish
Bulgarian	Hindi	Portuguese
Catalan	Hmong Daw	Romanian
Chinese Simplified	Hungarian	Russian
Chinese Traditional	Indonesian	Slovak
Czech	Italian	Slovenian
Danish	Japanese	Spanish
Dutch	Klingon	Swedish
English	Korean	Thai
Estonian	Latvian	Turkish
Finnish	Lithuanian	Ukrainian
French	Malay	Urdu
German	Maltese	Vietnamese
Greek	Norwegian	Welsh
Haitian Creole	Persian

TRANSLATE with

COPY THE URL BELOW

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