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Growing sodium chloride crystals at home
- NaOH 2y agoPrevious discussion: How to grow sodium chloride crystals at home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29255511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29255511 - Nov 2021 (184 comments)
- DeathArrow 2y agoI did it in the first or second grade after the teacher showed us how to.
- hyping9 2y ago[flagged]
- gus_massa 2y agoIn kindergarten you can grow a bunch of interlocked small crystals. It's difficult to make a nice big one, as a sibling comment complains. (We made a big one in high school, but it was AlK(SO4)2 instead of NaCl. They have a different shape. I'm not sure if they have other properties that make it easier. Kids may drink or eat it, I'm not sure if AlK(SO4)2 is safe enough for kindergarten. It was a side project that took a few month.) The article here is the "advanced" version that is necesary to make big crystals. These kind of stuff usualy get traction here since forever, so it's not surprising that it got to the front page (multiple times). (Bonus points for nice photos.)
- steve_adams_86 2y agoDespite seeing this before it’s always a joy to be brought back to this site. It feels like the old internet did in terms of content, but has the high quality presentation that the modern internet is capable of. It’s a real treat.
- huhtenberg 2y agoTried growing them after this post made it to the HN last time. Killed about two months on this and nothing good came out of it. Got some crystals, sure, but definitely nothing that is even in the same ballpark as in the post. It all sounds simple, in principle, but requires skills and experience. Like making a good carbonara or decent croissants. It's all in the technique.
- amelius 2y ago> It's all in the technique. Sounds like the technique was not fully documented then.
- aredox 2y agoThis post didn't dwelve on the fact your water needs to be pure - if you've got hard water, it's not going to work. Try again but with demineralized water - often sold in supermarkets to avoid scaling in clothing irons.
- amelius 2y agoYou might also want to look into the effect of vibrations in the room where your experiment takes place.
- fallingsquirrel 2y agoWould distilled water work or does it need to specifically be "demineralized"?
- marcosdumay 2y agoDistilled water is fine. Demineralized is normally cheaper and also fine.
- ldoughty 2y agoDistilled water is effectively demineralized... Not perfect... technically it's collected steam from boiling water, so it kills most bacteria and leaves most other material or minerals that can't be carried by steam.
- amelius 2y agoI want to know how to grow a silicon ingot at home.
- creshal 2y agoEasy: 1. Build a quartz crucible inside an inert argon atmosphere 2. Heat it to 2600F/1400C 3. Melt your highly pure silicon in it 4. Add in a seed at the top that the rest of the silicon can crystalize around 5. Now comes the tricky part that requires some experimentation: Pull out the seed very carefully while rotating it, so that an ingot forms around it as you keep pulling
- bjackman 2y agoAn even easier approach: if you want a 40cm ingot, you can just take a 80cm one that you grew before, and cut it in half
- LoganDark 2y agoHow do you cut it?
- jiggawatts 2y agoWith a diamond saw. Step one to making one of those is to compress and heat some carbon...
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y agoI genuinely think that was one of the more amusing exchanges I found on HN. There is just such a weird level of.. it could very well be a deadpan joke, but also a well-meaning, helpful response.
- exe34 2y agoit's like the advice on how to become a millionaire. start with a billion dollars, and start investing.
- Strawberry76 2y agoI hadn't seen this before. Will definitely try it. Knowing in advance that it might not work out.
- fp64 2y agoWhen I read about growing crystals online, I always have to think of the old 4chan "prank" that under the promise of beautiful crystals instructs the unsuspecting reader to brew some chloramine gas. Safe for Work screenshot of post: https://imgur.com/IKQRKqv https://imgur.com/IKQRKqv
- ncr100 2y agoto be clear this may kill you and any other nearby people
- throwup238 2y agoIf I remember correctly it originated on the private site LUElinks before spreading. …which I just found out shutdown last year. RIP
- accrual 2y agoIt's still alive in some form - the user database was migrated and old accounts can be accessed on the new site through a per-user token. If you had an account you may still be able to get the token and get into the new site. I haven't finished the transfer myself, though.
- rexpop 2y agoThis seems like Attempted Murder.
- Joker_vD 2y agoNah, bro, it's just a prank. On a more serious note, it's a small wonder sodium hypochlorite is not yet regulated as, say, potassium permanganate, considering its various uses.
- BizarroLand 2y agoTechnically, everything can be used to kill. You can stuff toilet paper into someones mouth until they choke to death on it. Should we regulate the sale of toilet paper to prevent potential murders?
- jononor 2y agoAnyone got resources on how to grow crystal that are piezoelectric? Would be awesome to grow my own microphone or accelerometer.
- pebm 2y agoLook up making Rochelle's salt, it's relatively straightforward to carry out in a kitchen using essentially the same equipment outlined in this article.
- jononor 2y agoGreat tip! Making Rochelle's salt definitely looks very doable. I found a video on YouTube that grew crystal and used it as mic on a guitar. Sounds pretty good to be honest! Though the form factor is a bit odd - a bulky crystal blob :D https://youtu.be/8QP7F1VT1rw?si=guMAa-oof6xQCgol https://youtu.be/8QP7F1VT1rw?si=guMAa-oof6xQCgol
- dukeofdoom 2y agoGrow these around led bulbs...if that would work. For better visuals.
- BizarroLand 2y agoI don't know if it would work but it could be cool to have the individual filaments encased in crystal, something like these: https://www.amazon.com/PRETYZOOM-100pcs-LED-Filament-Incandescent/dp/B0CT5Z2CJ4 https://www.amazon.com/PRETYZOOM-100pcs-LED-Filament-Incande...
- anothername12 2y agoIs there a maximum size for a crystal?
- adrianN 2y agoYes, eventually it will collapse into a black hole.
- gus_massa 2y agoThey can be very big, gor example https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220721-the-worlds-largest-crystal-cave https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220721-the-worlds-large... https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/giant-crystals-naica https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/giant-crystals-naica (Note that this crystals are not made of "table salt", they are made of "dehifrated paster". But in theory you can make crystals of table salt this big with enough time.)
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoThe first step says to use sea salt. I thought the defining feature of sea salt is that it was going to be a collection of minerals that happened to be dissolved in the ocean water collected that day. Practically speaking I assume little impact, but would you not want to start with more pure NaCl?
- andrewla 2y agoThis was posted before ages ago, and I suspect I know the answer, but I have to ask -- has anyone here successfully done this? I had grand designs to use ethanol as an anti-solvent to accelerate crystal growth, and I bet you can guess how much progress I made towards that goal. Maybe I've lost my hacker mojo entirely and should be expelled from this site forever. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_chloride#cite_ref-28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_chloride#cite_ref-28
- Levitating 2y agoYes I've grown some great salt crystals using this guide and little effort.
- gus_massa 2y ago> ethanol as an anti-solvent to accelerate crystal growth You usualy want something that evaporates very slowly to get big nice crystals.
- yehat 2y agoThat's great, but does anyone knows similarly accessible way of growing a fluorite crystal?
- kragen 2y agoi'm guessing you can add dilute solutions of sodium fluoride and calcium chloride dropwise to a large beaker of water being constantly stirred, with a seed crystal in it? fluorite has a very non-negligible water solubility of 15 mg/liter and a reasonably high melting point, so intuitively i'd think this should be easy and fast maybe the ingredients are hard for you to get tho, in which case you might be reduced to generating hydrogen fluoride from fluorite and an acid, then bubbling the gas into the beaker the standard industrial method sounds like it would be pretty annoying to do in your garage: > However single crystals for industrial applications are usually grown by solidification from a melt. The so-called Stockbarger-Bridgeman and the vertical gradient freeze processes are used for industrial manufacture of single crystals. The crystals are grown in a drawing oven and in a vacuum of 10^-־4 to 10^−5 mbar in the Stockbarger-Bridgeman method. A crystalline raw material is melted, so that a homogeneous single crystal is obtained with exacting control of temperature. > In order to make the single crystals up to now the crystalline raw material is slowly heated in a vessel to the volatilization or evaporation temperature of water of about 400° C. and is maintained at this temperature in order to keep it free of water for some time. Additive scavengers, such as PbF2, SnF2 or ZnF2, are used to remove oxygen from the raw material. The added scavengers react with the oxygen present in the raw material and arising partially by oxidation and/or hydrolysis to form easily volatile oxides, which escape at these temperatures. After that a so-called refinement during a single week at 1450° C. usually is performed followed by a multi-week cooling to about 1200° C., in which the desired crystal is solidified from the melt. The single crystal so obtained is then cooled in a first slow cooling phase and then cooled to room temperature in a second accelerated cooling phase after the first cooling phase. from https://patents.google.com/patent/US6364946B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6364946B2/en
- janci 2y agoI accidentally grew some big crystals from copper plating electrolyte (copper sulfate). Nice blue color.