This seems to be an amplifier tube of some sort, why it has graphite electrodes I don't know. Look under tungsten to find the actual bits I made. Frankly it's a testament to the temperature and oxidation resistance of graphite that there's anything left at all. The edges of the mold are thinned because it spent minutes on end directly under an oxyacetylene flame being heated to around 6000F. It turns out this is surprisingly easy, though the quality of the resulting bits can't possibly match that of commercially created material. Well actually, from tungsten carbide and cobalt powders. This is a little graphite mold I made for a Popular Science column about making tungsten carbide bits from scratch. Graphite mold for making tungsten carbide. The gaps are to allow the chips to escape, and possibly for cooling as well. The industrial-grade diamonds are embedded in a matrix of relatively soft iron, I'm pretty sure the bronze color is a plating, but it's too pretty to use and find out. Very attractive diamond-studded grinding wheel. HOPG (Highly Ordered Pyrolytic Graphite) is a particularly pure, crystal-like form of graphite with very smooth hexagonal sheets of carbon atoms. Unusually structured carbon graphite, described in this paper by P. The mine at Borrowdale was the first, and for a century the only, source of graphite, making it critical to the world's supply of pencils in the 1700s. As the rod is consume the copper is vaporized a bit back from the end. The copper is more electrically conductive than graphite, preventing excess voltage drop if the electrode clamps are attached at the far end of the rods. It's also no longer of this world, because I burned it up during shooting for my Popular Science article about how to burn up diamonds.Ĭomputer-generated model of a C 60 buckyball molecule.Ĭommon copper-clad graphic rods used in welding. It's quite large as diamonds go, but only semi-transparent and therefore worth astronomically less than you might think: Only about $100. This is a low-grade 2.71ct natural diamond. We had successfully burned a smaller Congo Cube diamond and a low-grade regular diamond without incident, but this one was much bigger and thus more susceptible to uneven heating, I suppose.įortunately we were able to gather a few of the fragments and use them in subsequent photography runs, including showing how they burn in liquid oxygen. There must have been some kind of internal fracture that gave way as it reached yellow heat. I was heating it with an oxy-hydrogen torch to get it to catch fire and burn (for my Popular Science article about how to burn diamonds) when suddenly and without warning there was a tremendous SNAP, I felt something hit my hand hard, and we all simultaneously realized that this was a very expensive SNAP. When I say "exploded" I mean it seriously exploded, in fact with such force that two diamond fragments dug holes into the lens we were using to photograph the event. They are worth far less than clear gem-quality diamonds, but one this big is still several hundred dollars. "Congo Cube" diamonds are clusters of small yellowish crystals. This was a huge, HUGE 7.45ct diamond before it exploded. The real thing is packaged in glass jars and displayed in a deli case at whatever museum it is at (which changes from time to time). Sadly this pen is does not contain any actual Chrissy Caviar, it's just a commemorative item. The whole thing works as a pencil.Ĭhrissy Caviar is just like regular caviar, except instead of being fish eggs, it's human eggs. Very lovely, detailed, baby-sized hand made of bonded graphite. In this poster, pretty trumps practical.Ĭlick here to buy a book, photographic periodic table poster, card deck, or 3D print based on the images you see here!Ī small chip of pyrolytic graphite, suitable for levitating on magnets. Graphite is also pure carbon and widely used in pencils, but not nearly as pretty. Pictures, stories, and facts about the element Carbon in the Periodic Table HĪ diamond is forever, unless you heat it too much and it burns up into carbon dioxide gas.
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