Well, no effort was put towards my hair at least. Edit to add: I definitely should have worn safety glasses! My bad.

Shouldn't there be some kind of thermal compound between the lamp and the bottle? Otherwise the trapped air will just hinder the whole process

The sentence: im pretty pro led .btw is one of my favorites ever it genuisly true and so funny

Brake clean is great stuff

"Water doesn't do that because it's cheeky." Y'know who else is blue and cheeky?

7:13 "... this lamp's goop has been replaced with my very own." just gonna leave that one here

short answer, the stuff inside a lava lamp is wax and water

Use the wax to start a fire, outdoor fire pit kind of stuff.

Just wanted to say I love your content

Gotta love lava lamps, tip, don't shake them or they won't work anymore :) Can you even buy these now? I thought they died out in the 70's? when lsd was all the rage ha..

This whole video was "it worked! Until it didnt, THEN I MADE IT WORK, till it didnt

Your videos remind me of that iCarly episode where they were paid to do a sponsorship for the really dangerous shoes. Where their voices were extremely cheery will talking about how the shoes would catch fire and you could use them to make hotdogs. I LOVE EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF YOUR CHANNEL!!!

Take a shot everytime he says "clear" or "clearly"

I have a bottle full of tetrachloroethylene pressurized with carbon dioxide and I am definitely not going to use it to make a lava lamp.... or 7.

i wanna eat the goo

What a wild ride.

such an interesting channel. Congrats in educating us ignorant swines

at 21:42 you said to put the toaster oven out door. it would also be a whise choice to not use it for food anymore sinds the chemicals can get stuck on the inside an leak on the food and its just a risk not worth risking. take it from a chemist. i realy enjoyed this video

Lol I'm scared by the fact I cleaned my hands with brake clean a couple times

I'll save youse some time. Buy a lava lamp. Get an empty wine bottle. Pop cap on both. Dump lava lamp contents into wine bottle. Bam. You made a lava lamp.

lol lava lamps are cool are all, but glitter lamps are where it's at. They're like a disco ball but wayyyy easier to setup and they're perfect mood lighting.

The linseed oil is polymerizing, which is why it's starting to separate out.

This still seems like a more responsible use for break clean than my usual task of killing wasps...

Damn you went down the rabbit hole I did 2 years ago and reached all the same conclusions lmfao I hit a wall trying to figure out how to make my own dye from commercially available stuff, especially making glitterball lava. Check out my "Elephant's Foot" video if you wanna see one of my experiments melting down metallic oil pastels

These are important questions

Great video

"This lamp's gloop has been replaced with my very own!"

"A formula from a 1968 US patent consisted of water and a transparent, translucent, or opaque mix of mineral oil, paraffin wax, and carbon tetrachloride." google: 4 seconds you: 24 minutes i see your game now. the last video was utter BS, stop viewtime grabbing you're just peppering interesting stuff with gamified view-time grabs now

Love the Commodore 64 shirt!

And just like that I got a New ringtone..... Woohoo turn that down a bit

industrial wax

Wax

I would recommend storing the old bottles away from direct sunlight as tetrachloroethylene can break down to phosgene on exposure to UV light (which is mega toxic). See here: pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Tetrachloroethylene

Clear clearly clear clear clear clearly😂

You should see if NileRed can help with this particular conundrum. That would be an awesome collab.

Well, tour video has stewed in my mind, and i broke. I bought a new lava lamp. Its been 17 years since i last owned one lol

I love the parts when he describes the smell of haloalkanes nostalgically, like it’s no health worry

This was brilliant to watch, now I have to find UK alternatives this stuff. And I'm wondering what the goop is in those... decorative maze timer things, if anyone knows what I'm talking about. Little plastic 'tanks' that had lots of little platforms and/or funnels for the tiny bubbles of goop to squeeze through and collect at the bottom through? Then you turned it over and watched it all over again?

Andy Rooney has been reincarnated as an informative, useful person.

Ok, here's an idea. Melt the wax in the bottle. Put the bottle into the double boiler wish a rag (or canning rack) at the bottom so the glass isn't in direct contact with the metal. Drop in your spring and then add chunks of wax to the bottle and then bring the double boiler to temperature. Get the wax melted, take it off of the heat, and THEN add the brake cleaner. I wouldn't add the cleaner while still on heat because you don't want to evaporate the cleaner, you want it to mix in and as the bottle cools anything in the air inside the bottle should start to condense on the walls of the bottle and fall down into the mix. I would use some sort of rubber stopper or self-sealing cap on the bottle and still inject the cleaner so that you don't have brake cleaner fumes rush out and get you high, but this way you can now swirl the wax around and get the brake cleaner to mix evenly with it before adding the water and without having to deal with open containers of this stuff. Just wrap it in a towel and swirl it around until it starts to solidify. Shaking it would probably work, too, but might coat the inside of your bottle with wax that might take a while to melt off. Swirling it around with the spring at the bottom will probably be enough to whisk it together, though. You might also try adding the pigment to the brake cleaner before mixing it into the wax. This might help get a more consistent color and also might even help the cleaner to mix evenly into the wax. Im imaging that the pigment + brake cleaner mix will work a bit like funky roux for your lava gravy. Then you can put your bottle over a lamp and wait to see if it melts under incandescent temperatures, put back in double boiler and add more cleaner if needed. Once the consistency seems right, then add your water, cap, and then put on your Pink Floyd and take your mollyacid, you goddamned hippy. Get a job cut and a real hair, pinko.

Use crayons!! I did this in middle school and had great success.

For the density additive, you would likely need a halogenated hydrocarbon. A hydrocarbon with only hydrogen and carbon is quite unlikely to reach the density required. Putting in things like oxygen and nitrogen will make it polar and dissolve in the water. So the only real option is putting a halogen onto it. And in general, iodine is denser than bromine, which is denser than chlorine. Bromobenzene has a solubility of 0.04% in water, and a density of 1.5 g/ml, and a a vapour pressure of 4.18 mm Hg (at least according to wiki). 1,4-dibromobenzene (or p-dibromobenzene) is even less soluble in water and even more dense (1.84 g/ml) and while I can't find its vapour pressure it is likely to be much lower than water. However it is a solid at room temp. However I'm not sure of the solubility of them in parafin wax. As they are non-polar they are likely soluble in it.

can I just say that I have set my house on fire trying to recreate the lava lamp with RUBBING ALCOHOL. please do not ever try this, I still have scars from it, but hell am I interested in trying again, this time with non-flammable materials.

dude most o'does look overheated not to mention the back one

I'd love for you to do a video on a version you'd deem safe to do at home.

could you use rgb led's and a induction coil to directly heat the coil in the lamp?

I'd prefer leaving it to evaporate outside, rather than in a garage.

Today's lamps most likely contain a mix of isopropanol and ethylene glycol as well as water. Basically, instead of increasing the density of the wax, they decrease the density of the liquid. These substances are pretty harmless unless you drink them. But why would you ever do this? Older models did in fact contain perchloromethane (or perchloroethylene) however they stopped using it in the 70s due to health concerns.

If you want to know what's in literally anything look at medical documents because docters have to know what in stuff because health reasons

"Can't exactly put an LED bulb in an oven can you?" Why yes... yes I can... and did... and wondered why it burnt out so quickly I've learned since then! lol

I've been quoted as saying on many occasions, that if my house ever is burning down and I can grab just one thing; it's going to be my lava lamp.

I broke an old lava lamp when I was a kid. I remember it smelled like the stuff you use to strip furniture.

FYI, Kremer Pigments is the place to go for raw micron-sized pigment powders.

You could use an aquarium tool to measure specific gravity of water (salinity )

I love his facial expressions while he adds his chemicals to the lavalamps! "Yup. Wait. Huh?! No..ew!"

Thanks to #chubbyemu, I know to never drink those things!

It is impossible to over state how important it is to not heat up brake clean. I learned in welding class that using brake clean to clean parts Pryor to welding may produce a gas that can kill you at a concentration of just five parts per million.

I love the hair

9:35 "brake cleaner is... Probably not *particularly* dangerous" Me, a mechanic, at the end of my shift washing my hands with brake cleaner: *I mean pretty much*

7:04 Actually... the first and only lava lamp i had contained yellow wax and clear water. Which makes this video kind of more funny than it already was.

7:04 Actually... the first and only lava lamp i had contained yellow wax and clear water. Which makes this video kind of more funny than it already was.

2:08 : a fun frequent phenomenon found in Flava Flamps when they warm up is the spiky tower of wax! xD lol Flava flamps.

Most candle dyes are going to be the powders (many of the use the titanium dioxide that you're wanting anyways) that you're looking for. That should make the color stay stable.

Call your trash company. You can take the failed lamps to a chemical recycle center.

This was hilarious and fascinating

or you find a proper disposal company for chemicals to ensure it is taken care of properly. Sometimes universities will take it your hand for a small fee and add it to their chemical disposal collection, as they collect a lot from the research labs on their campuses.

My first lava lamp used ordinary cooking oil as the "wax" part, and to make the water less dense so the oil would sink, I mixed it about 50:50 with isopropanol. Different cooking oils have slightly different densities, so depending on which one you use, you can adjust the ratio of isopropanol and water to ensure that the oil only just sinks. It worked a treat, but was confiscated from me at school because the electrical PAT testers thought that it was dangerous, and they were probably right - the alcohol/water mixture contained enough alcohol to still be flammable. For my next effort, I wanted an oily substance that would be slightly denser than water all on its own, without needing to mix alcohol with the water, and without being horribly toxic either. Searching through my chemistry data book turned up a compound called acetophenone (aka acetylbenzene or methyl phenyl ketone), a natural product which is a component of almond essence - it has a really strong "amaretto" type smell. I obtained some from Ebay, mixed it with some red "biro" ink to dye it, and put it into an old vodka bottle along with some ordinary tap water. This worked a treat when mounted over a 20 or 30 watt light bulb - the only concern was that if the bottle had ever broken or leaked, there would have been a permanent and strong almond smell on whatever the contents touched!

brakleen can be used to kill wasps and such. they dissolve into moving gummi bears from it. its some nasty stuff.

Why do I get the vibe this dude is the same guy that could have hosted a kids, daytime public television show about science stuff in the 80's, anyone else???

Yeah my dad (a mechanic) sprays brake cleaner on hornet nests to kill them.

I wish lava lamps had a led light to switch to in order to keep the wax from bunching at the top because the entire lamp is hot

Just like the space heater episode - an instant hit!

Thanks so much for explaining this. I just bought a 1970s Lava Lamp on ebay that's in sad shape. If it ends up not working I wanted to salvage it by making my own lava for it. The only write-up I found online other than this was mentioning mixing PERC with parafin. I didn't want to be driving around from laundromat to laundromat like a weirdo asking them to sell me a cup of it. Meanwhile I have a whole case of red-can Brakleen in my garage. I've been using it for 25 years and haven't died yet, so you're probably OK to just dump it on the concrete and let it evaporate. Lord knows I've used at least 100 cans of this stuff and it just drips onto the ground and evaporates quickly. Also now that I know that BraKleen is mostly PERC, I'll probably try to remove stains from my clothes with it. Fun!

"Millennials have no attention span" Me, transfixed for 25 minutes by Technology Connections explaining the chemical composition of lava lamps

It's always "we'll get to that" And never "we're there."

try glycerin instead of soap? fun fact; Alec's garage is a Superfund site

Have you been on Oozinggoo.com? I found many interesting facts on the forum as to the fluid and wax makeup Some have used propylene glycol in the water

Why not try melting some crayons in with the paraffin wax? The folks at Crayola seem to have the whole pigment thing down, and I would bet it’s more dense than paraffin.

"This lamps goop has been replaced with my very own" He put his own goop in the lamp guys.

so i tried to refill my lava lamp but now the wax is to runny. Do i need to add more salt solution or more soap

Why did his wine bottle wax have a ton of small wax balls? I had a lava lamp do that and it’s not as appealing like his other one

Flippy Flip Flava Flamps c:

I still wanna know if you can touch the goop or will it be too hot? I'm to scared to try it and don't have a lamp so someone be my sacrifice to 2021.

Pulls out brake cleaner: *DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!!!!* Me: orders 50 cans of brake cleaner to try with at home

You don't have toxic waste disposal at your local waste/recycling center?

Absolutely adore the amusing alliterations

www.mmsd.com/what-you-can-do/home-haz-mat-collection for disposal of home made concoctions.

Contact the MNmorer NileRed, he will turn lava lamp oil into candy or something

MICA PIGMENTS! Lol

I will buy a lava lamp one day

No Effort November is my favorite month

Hey aren't you the guy with the half silver face?

Great stuff, great video. Ooh, where did you get that black lavalamp? It's beautiful! I did some experimenting myself a few years ago when I was into lavalamps, mine was an Astro from Mathmos. I got some 'perk' (perchlorethylene) from a drycleaner and mixed it with molten wax /praffin granulate. You need to 'cook' you lava first just like you do in your clip, preferably use a beaker or flask with a beak standing in a pot of hot water. Then slowly mix in the perk, about 20-30 % of your total lava amount, add coloring for candles, blending it slowly or you get bubbles. And don't heat it over 75*C. Then poor the lava slowly into a clean lamp/bottle and let it cool. When lava is solid add water. We have clean tap water here in Sweden so I used that, and put only a drop or two of dishwashing detergent in it, you can dilute one drop in some water to make it dissolve quicker and avoid putting too much of it into your lamp. The detergent regulates the blob's size and resolution, less detergent does larger blobs, adding more detergent will get you many smaller blobs, so take care not to use too much or you will end up with many small blobs that will never coagulate. Salt is used to balance the wax in water float property (the density of water). Remember when when adding your perk try first only minimum, like 20 % of complete wax amount. Use half a teaspoon salt to start, adding more if necessary. Use grain / rock salt (simple salt) without iodine or any additives, or you may cloud the water. And dissolve your salt in a separate container first so you only poor salt concentrate into your lamp. Also mind to not fill the lamp all the way, keep an inch or so for adding salt water. The water level should leave at least half inch at the top of the bottle, it will expand with heat! Then test switching on your lamp for 30-60 mins and see how it works, regulate the 'wax-weight' by extracting or adding clean, or salt, water. Once your wax cycles well, hot wax floats upwards, then cools and sinks down, then your lamp is tuned OK.

Omg. You’re clearly killing me with the “clearly”

Lava lamps are night lights for big kids

brakeleen is every technicians favorite spray, using it to clean brakes, carburetors, throttle bodies and as starting fluid

great video! this explains why my friend’s lava lamp wax floated to the top after the light bulb was replaced. was probably too hot and caused the brake fluid to separate from the wax

Nice explanation. Also good for chemical investigations. (Though not as meticulously documented as good science demands.) As far as creating a lava lamp, I'll leave that to dedicated tinkerers like you, and I'll just buy a nice one.

Yes, kosher salt is best: most table salt like Morton use anticaking agents which don't dissolve in water. Morton used this as a selling point, saying "When it rains, it pours," indicating that the salt runs freely in humid conditions and doesn't clog up.

Listen here, dude: I have no idea why I keep watching your videos. You are a thing, but your thing isn't a thing. Eh? The dark side of the moon. There's nothing else to say. Okay?