No way! I spent a long time looking into synthetic opal production some years ago and never was able to uncover the secretive process. I've got an opalized fossil collection myself. Man this is great. Thank you
I've found a Russian patent about an inductrial production process for making opals. They let regular quartz grow in an autoclave, and then they heat-treat it to let it develop microcracks, and those microcracks have the same diffraction effects as real opal. So they make a big piece of ordinary quartz, then cut into small pieces. The pieces get covered in sand, and they get slowly heated up to 550°C. They mention 2 methods: 1) slowly heat it up with 10°/hour, keep it at 550° for 4 hours, and they let it cool at 10° per hour; in their testing this gave a failure rate (fractured gems) of 1%. 2) in their high volume runs they let it heat by 60°/hour, keep it at 550° for 15 hours, and let it cool at 60°/h; but that gives failure rates of up to 5%. All the heat-treated gemstones become opalescent+white (even the fractured ones). So *you could try this process yourself with store-bought quartz,* that should work out as far as I can tell... So they used quartz that was grown at 30-32MPa, 300°C in a solution of 7-10% NaCO3 and 0.5-1% NaOH. They say that this is the standard way for industrial quartz production. If you succeed: put the opal into your batman projector, i'm curious to see how that will look.
I know this video is very old and someone else might have given you the secret. But to avoid that vertical banding in synthetic opals. When you dry it over months you want the container to tilt along the vertical axis by around 5-15 degrees over 4-7 days as it settles. You can also have it Roll around the axis slowly over the same time.
It's wild that when I heard him say that, my suggestion would've been to do just that lmao. Like if the settling causes the striatiions, just agitate it ever so slightly: just enough to stop the patterning, but not so much as to completely disrupt the delicate process
@@ghstgirl4982 What I thought too! The stripes are due to the same inputs leading to the same outputs, so if we slightly alter the inputs, that should change the outputs enough to break up the tiger stripes. Interesting that you only need a tiny amount of tilting, and equally surprised that it occurs over a pretty short period of time- less than (or up to) a week of time, during a months-long drying process
Synthetic opals are extremely popular in the high end glass market. Typically they're encased in a glass which magnifies the stone and makes them even more beautiful. They can also be crushed into dust and inlayed into the glass. It basically looks like the most incredible glitter you've ever seen.
I want to see this crushed opal in glass SO bad now. What could I google search to find pics of this? Searching 'crushed opal in glass' only leads me to finding Google image results of little baggies of the stuff. But I'm now INFINITELY curious to see this stuff in glasswear now 👀👀
"Cactus Juice" resin should solve your problem. Its a low viscosity, thermally set, resin which is generally used for stabilising wood. Lots of tutorials on how to use it online. I've used it before and it works fantastically.
Try stabilizing the opals by saturating them with Starbond Thin CA glue instead of epoxy resin. It's generally used with wood but it's water thin and will saturate the opal way better and will leave it with a high gloss finish just like resin. It's completely clear.
20:20 Hey! Resin artist here hope I'm not too late! So to stabilize a piece of opal in resin you may want to invest in a pressure pot to force the resin into the pours of the stone. If it can take the pressure this process with two part epoxy may be your best bet! Or for the UV resin you have- if the atone can't withstand the pressure pot; try soaking the opal overnight in UV resin in a dark black room then cure the next day. That way the thicker resin has time to become a puzzle piece. *** Third option is catalyst epoxy. It creates its own heat while curing so I'm not sure how it will work for you. It's a very thin resin and has a quick curing time. But it could be a good experiment! Loved the video and hope this helps ✌
love it .....also always caeful with catalyst epoxys...not a resin artist but construction worker...andyou have to know material tolerances and how it will react TO the reaction taking place on it....either way great tips....gonna save these for later 👍
I am a resin artist also, and I use Liquids Diamonds, it's so thin. It's by The Epoxy Resin Store (don't forget the word "The" or you end up someplace different), I've never seen a resin so thin before and because of that so few bubbles in the end. But I have to wait for it to thicken for my wall art pieces.
What about stabilizing resin? editing to add this info: Stabilizing resin is *designed* to seep into porous things such as wood. Put them into a pressure chamber to help reduce bubbles and hopefully reduce breakage. I believe Peter Brown (since you mentioned him) has used it a small handful of times on his channel.
Me: “Oh I’m gonna try to grow some opals at home cool!” Thought Emporium 4 minutes through the video: “…and all we need is some silicon nano particles.”
they do lol. unless getting fancy schmansy, most people spend 15-20 bucks on a set of dice. well done stone die are about that price for a single 18mm D20
I was very interested until he started talking about the 10,000 psi thing. I'm still interested, but I guess I won't be able to "just" wait 7 months to get results I want.
Most the synthetic opals I've found (since I LOVE opal and have been looking this stuff up for years) are usually just held together with resin. You can even find companies that sort their products by % resin.
Agreed, wouldn't the world be so much better if everybody collaborated for a better shared understanding instead of competed for worthless paper rectangles and all of the unpleasant shared side effects that comes from that? How can we bring about the conditions that lead to the Handover of societal Norms to the scientists instead of the parasitical politicians money Junkies power mongers and megalimaniacomaniacs with aspirations of world domination without having to go full out 12 Monkeys?
Chemistry is the direct descendant of alchemy. If you arrange sand in a particular way it can do math better than you (a chip). Don't tell me that ain't magic.
@@arnaudmenard5114 I don’t remember who said it but someone sait that there are two types of magic. They are magic we use to describe why something happens(chemistry) and magic that we just believe bc why not(religion)
As a South Australian listening to you pronounce Coober Pedy is murdering my ears but thank you for mentioning us. It’s also pretty tragic that they’ve found fossils here that aren’t worth as much as their opal value so they get destroyed.
One can hear the words are being spoken in English all the way through the video but after 3 mins my concentration went as if he was talking in tongues! But for those who can pay attention, its brilliant im sure! thumbs up.
I'm soooo glad it wasn't just me. I thought this was gonna be an ingredient list from walmart kind of DIY, not a "i have an entire professional science lab at my disposal, no big deal" DIY xD
For resins, try Opticon. You actually soak the opal in part A for awhile, then add the hardener to the stone (not the part A). Look at Emerald treatment for hints, but you do cover some of it at the end. Pressure AND Vacuum are more ideal. Warmed part A make penetration better.
One idea instead of using a vacuum chamber to pull the air out of the opals (as the opal may be hanging onto the air inside too well for the vacuum to be strong enough to pull it out through the resin) may be to use a pressure pot instead to compress the air inside so the resin can fill in the empty voids. It will still leave you with air in the opal, but it will be crushed down to the point where it probably will be unnoticeable. Another idea which I just got while writing this was to pull the vacuum on the opal first, to pull the air out of it, then add the resin on top of the opal while under vacuum. This may require a device to hold a cup of resin in the chamber and tip it into the cup with the opal remotely. Once you open the chamber with the opal submerged still in liquid resin the resin should be pulled into the opal due to the pressure differential inside the opal compared to the atmosphere. There are definitely thinner resins on the market that will help you in this task as well.
Your first idea with the pressure pot is on a good path. Using a thin resin and the pressure pot may be useful. The second won't work very well. When you are pulling a vacuum on the resin, it doesn't release air trapped inside it. Instead, it is essentially boiling off the VOC's that are in the resin before any of the air can escape. At a later point you may finally be pulling any air within the opal out, which if you are letting the opal/resin cure under vacuum, the resin will have no force pushing/pulling it into the opal. Degassing then re-pressurizing as seen in the video just won't work due to the forces needed to move the resin. He could try stabilizing with cactus juice stabilizer which is much thinner and is used under vacuum, but needs to be baked to cure it.
@@MGgoose1 I never said you should let it cure under vacuum, that's not a good idea. You should dunk the opal in resin under vacuum but release the vacuum while the resin is still liquid to be pulled into the opal from the pressure differential when releasing the vacuum. As I already pointed out.
@@tedtrower9260 No, that's not how that works. Curing resin under pressure to squash air bubbles infinitesimally small does not lead to the resin, or whatever matrix is embedded in the resin, to explode.
@Switch & Lever: This agrees with my understanding as well. Cure under pressure in order to minimize bubbles and drive (thin) resin into the part. A quick vacuum before curing under pressure may help get rid of large bubbles adhering the surface of the part. @MGoose1: VOCs shouldn't be much of an issue with epoxy resin. Polyester resin has high VOCs.
If you do end up getting a drying chamber like that I recommend renting some industrial space outside the city and maybe getting an engineer consultant to double check your numbers.
It might even be worth the money (though tbh I am not sure how expensive that would be, compared to homebuilding it) to pay to have it professionally manufactured. I dunno about you, but for me "not accidentally blowing myself up" has a pretty high value
@@zuthalsoraniz6764 its not actually hard to make these things reliably safe. a professional engineer and manufacturer could build you a large pressure chamber that is no heavier than it needed to be. has the most convenient access system that is safe and doesn't waste materials or manufacturing time. but it will be expensive and hard to mod a skilled amateur will build a smaller chamber, with thicker walls, just to be on the safe side, getting samples in and out will probably be harder but being so familiar with it it will be easier to modify for other projects.
Up until my fiance bought be an opal flower ring, I never gave much thought about their beauty. What is so beautiful about them is that something in nature is this beautiful and captivating and is naturally made by the Earth. It is so cool that it isn't one set color. And it matches absolutely everything you wear because it seems to reflect certain colors more when it is near any color. It really is a captivating stone.
Christa - opal was my favourite stone at one point. Now it is one among many favourites. Watermelon tourmaline, adventurine, mother of pearl, pearl, there are many fascinating optical effects in various minerals - chatoyancy, tiger eye effects, tha many stones that show various forms of asterism, the stones that are different colors in different light, stones that are a different color with reflected vs transmitted light, ctones like Labradorite, pleichroism, etc. - lots of fun, attractice stuff. Opals are one of the most delicate stones, in ancient jewelry that had opals the stone hasusually dried out and crumbled. Pearl is also somewhat delicate but not nearly as delicate as opal. There is a mine out west that is open to the public that is loaded with large, beautiful opals, but they are useless as jewelry as the stones immediately deteriorate if not kept wet - they are mined just for the fun of it.
Thing I like best about mine is even a few years later i still see new things,when I heard you always see something new I was sceptical but 100% the most beautiful natural stone/gemstone I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in minerals or stones you won't regret it even with the price tag lol
@@deandeann1541 I love how Alexandrite flashes purple or green depending on the lighting you're in. My mom told me when I got an opal ring that I needed to rub it on my face to oil it to keep it from drying out, and I did faithfully, until I found out that most opals (even natural ones) are sealed for use in jewelry these days... But both chemically and physically speaking, pearls are WAY more sensitive, not only will the oils of your skin naturally change their color, but even MAKE UP can damage their luster (by scratching them) But don't take my word for it, just see how an opal vs a pearl react to red wine spilled on them and blotted off right away....
@@BurninGems an autoclave. Vessel hollow container, especially one used to hold liquid, such as a bowl or cask. A pressure vessel is typically inches thick steel that can contain or resist great atmospheric pressure or hydraulic pressure.
opal might actually come in useful for data encryption. powdered opal, when shaken, moves around and glitters differently. if taken picture of and encoded into text, it might come in handy as an encryption key, which is the tool needed to encrypt and decrypt information.
Just use nail polish in a bottle. Got a topcoat full of iridescent hexagons of different sizes which when you shake/move it changes drastically. Though that one (Wizard Lizard by Colores de Carol) is perhaps a little too heavily packed to get it to change as easily as a less packed one. The base is quite thick. But still, that's easier & cheaper than getting a box of opal powder.
I've looked at some Russian research, and I've found a simpler method to make Opals. The trick is to grow quartz in an autoclave, and then heat-treat it to let it develop microcracks. Here's a more detailed explanation: The idea is let the quartz grow at 298°C at 30.5MPa in a solution of 1%NaOH and 10%Na2CO3, and it will grow with a speed of 0.4mm per 24 hours. However during a prototype run with smaller quantities, they grew quartz at 326° 32.3MPa, 0.5%NaOH and 7%Na2CO3, with slightly faster growing rates. The big chuck of quartz is then cut into small pieces. The pieces get covered in sand, and they get slowly heated up to 550°C. In the testrun they let it heat up 10° every hour, they kept it at 550° for 4 hours, and they let it cool at 10° per hour; with this process
@@p.f.3014 Yeah! Well, the 2nd part is fairly simple: just bury it in sand and slowly heat up while controlling the temp. We're talking about any sand, and atmospheric pressure. But the process of growing quartz at 30Mpa is a bit trickier, that's 300 times our atmospheric pressure... You're probably better off getting commercially made synthetic quartz, which is not that expensive. But the quartz that you buy, should be made under the conditions that I mentioned.
@@Richard-ed7tf Alright, let's see. Patent RU2132414C1 is, afaik what I talked about in this comment 3 years ago. Other russian research papers use TEOS, to create nanoparticles to grow opals.
Have you tried running some soundwaves through the container as it sets its pattern? Maybe the 7.83 hz that is supposed to be the Earth's frequency. It'd be interesting to see if you could dial in different patterns or stacking of the particles.
It would probably mess up the opals shiny construct. Sound is vibration, vibration is constant movement. Like he said the samples sat still for months n the one time he tried motion it turned into a white chunk. So sound probably wouldnt be the way to go but its worth a shot. Maybe some sort of low range sounds possibly.
Also i just thought this, if you put sound directly around with the sample at the center, i can imagine the molecules being pushed away from the walls concentraded to a center, possibly creating an interesting piece of opal.
Someone needs to try it and let me know. Cause the physics off applied heay and pressure arent nor have to be so extreme as most gems to grow. So besides heat n preassure, resonance is the only other idea i have. It may take some trial n error but i can say id deffiniely go for lower frequency. Lower frequency less vibration. High frequency and you got an earth quake turning the mix into that whitw not as pretty rock.
I REALLY hope you'll be making that drying chamber. Gemstones are one of my favourite subjects, so it'd be incredibly interesting to see you make more.
How To Make Cheath Opals: First you need 200k equitment and 5k materials and PhD in chemistry and geology Then you can make very cheap opal gems at home, YAY!!
Not true. You'd be amazed at what a cpl guys in back room of a straw hut in India or Thailand can do. They rip off unsuspectingvtourists for $100s/$1000 for pennies. A little cathode tube ( green TV picture tube) a cpl 7 up bottles add handful of graphite pull the glass as it cools= bam ! Fake emeralds w nat looking inclusions & striations. Add a touch of beryllium to quartz in standard pressure cooker, fake morganite/ orange sapphire.
@Beauty Queen by making a gem you mean cutting a genuine stone? I'm studying gemology to become a gemologist. I'm doing the colored stone course. Not just diamonds. Its tough. We did a lab on treatments synthetics & simulants. Theres so many minerals. This ended up on my feed sparked my intrest. There's more efficient ways than chem composite. IE Flame fusion, diffusion, hydrothermal, etc. I was a nerdy kid.🤓
@@Noelciaaa Don't even need that. You'd be amazed what 2 guys, propane tank, NO EDU in grass hut can do. Ebay is full of them. Never confuse formal EDU for intelligence.
I feel like that non-tigerstripe pattern might have a mechanic solution, where during the setteling process the opal is disturbed ever so slightly to knock some of the structure and force it to stack in different ways. Just a theory, of course, but it does seem the most organic to me.
I was wondering about this, or possibly siphoning the solution off after a while and replacing it with another "color" of the solution. Alternately, maybe putting an uneven surface at the bottom of the settling chamber, so they have different planes to stack against?
Agree. Trying to think of something that would have been practical in the 70s. Someone mentioned sound waves, but that seems a stretch for that time period. Seems obvious to connect the vertical pattern to gravity, but maybe I'm missing something. But perhaps, a way to rotate it extremely slowly, even incrementally while it settles. Like suspended by a multi-axis yoke like for mounting a globe. Either keep it moving at a snail's pace, or use stepper motors to move it slowly, randomly a few degrees at a time over the course of an hour/day and then stop and let it settle a bit in each new position for a week or whatever the time needs to be.
To avoid the streaking effect, can you form the final product in 2 steps. create one product with the aligned striations, fracture that into bits, then use those bits along with more nanoparticles to fill in the gaps to make a second product. Now all those striations from the first product should be randomized when the second product forms.
The thing is, many gemstones (especially diamond) are a lot cheaper to get out of the earth than you end up paying for them. Because clearly "high quality" means it came from a f**king hole in the ground!
@@Guru_1092 yeah, diamonds aren't that rare. It's the companies that made it like this. Did you know Africa, the country that has most of the diamonds doesn't even make 1/10 of the money from the diamonds that companies make.
@@wesleymays1931 not necessarily . The diamonds made in lab actually have higher quality crystalline structure than even the finest natural diamonds. There is no such thing as a high quality diamond,only people trying to make money by selling lies.
perhaps the best stabilizer may be a heat activated wood stabilizer. These are made for penetration and are low viscosity. However, the principle of vacuum stabilization presupposes that there are air pockets in the material which will be evacuated by inducing a vacuum. When the vacuum is released the stabilization fluid penetrates into these voids which previously held air. I suspect there will be minimal penetration into an opal pellet which holds no fractures or voids (aka centrifuge sample). Other ways of stabilization may involve the introduction of trace amounts of aluminum after the microspheres have formed and just before centrifugation. A kaolite clay solution could be centrifuged beforehand with the wet-but-decanted pellet left in place and the opal microsphere solution carefully layered on top before it is centrifuged. This may provide trace aluminum and magnesium as well as yield a flat pellet rather than a pointed one because the nose of the tube was prefilled. Final suggestion? Place the pellet in the center of a ball of clay, wrap that in a layer of cotton and place the whole of it in a ziplock bag and forget about it for a year. This will allow for very, very slow migration of water out of the opal as the ball loses water through the plastic. This is an old trick for high water content opal that crazes after being taken from the ground.
I'm already bored cuz this is all so over my head but if the answer to the roast beef mystery is solved, I'm gonna hang in there! Always wondered about that😎
Injection molding won't help, you can just use some molds and put in the opalescent water inside them (with a long vertical tube so that there would be enough particles for the whole nold)
Fun fact: William Lawrence Bragg was born in Adelaide, South Australia. The main reason it's a "fun fact" is that South Australia supplies at least 80% of the world's supply (the rest of Australia supplies maybe 75% of the rest); it's nice to see the South Australian physicist (either him or his father) involved with explaining the gemstone so common to the state.
worse, you don't die you just raise your cancer risk and spend a week coughing up some nasty stuff. I worked with nano silica and you cough bricks if you aren't really careful handling it.
Thats easy. There are several methods. Chatham diffusion is best. The flame fusion, hydrothermal growth techniques using natural seed synthetic mtrls. LGF using natural conundrum, & is more of a filler technique. We'll see what he chooses.😁
SiO2 Nanoparticle specialist here: I unfortunately also do not have an idea to solve the drying issue without proper equipment but I suggest you to make as huge of a piece as possible by sedimentation and pray that it breaks into huge bits so you can still use those. For filling up the gaps you might also use TMOS instead of TEOS which can be easily hydrolyzed with just water to it's roughly 1000x higher reactivity in comparison to it's Ethanol-brother. it also happens to have a much higher solid content (TEOS=28-29%, TMOS= 39-40%) so by using an RoR value of ~1.0, which is easily enough to hydrolyze all Me-O-Si groups, you would only need to let the gaps soak in that solution a couple of times to ensure they're filled completely. TMOS forms a gel fairly quickly after its reaction with water so working fast is requested. Don't shy away of using your vacuum chamber to make it soak faster. You might also use some kind of monomer found in plastic production which is more liquidy than a resin and polymerize it after soaking the raw-Opal in it. Maybe a polyaddition or radical polymerization would suit it quite well... polycondensation is a little tricky as you can see on the TMOS example since you force a shrinkage and might have to repeat the process several times. I do not know which monomers are comercially available unfortunately :( I might also try this out in my own lab! At least I own spherical Nanoparticles in all sizes... lets see where this leads to! Avoiding these tiger stripes looks like quite a challenge... maybe they disturbed the sedimentation just so much so the partickes align differently aftterwards by heat or vibration or whatever but these are just guesses. overall really good video! Enjoyed watching it quite a bit.
OMG! THANK YOU! You have just answered a lifelong question I’ve wondered about since I was little. The iridescence of turkey lunch meat. I just figured they were adding a hint of gasoline or some other sketchy chemicals. What a relief.
This is such an old video, but I actually have a piece of lab-grown opal without that pattern! It's wild knowing the process that went behind making it, and even crazier knowing that the process for mine is probably even more complicated.
When it comes to resin casting, from my experience UV resin has a tendency to expand slightly on curing so I typically don't use it. Instead I use a brand or two part resin I found on Amazon called Shebebe, mostly because it was cheap, degasses readily, is very clear and reasonably thin. Of course if it needs to be thinner, there are additives, but you can also heat it with a space heater to around 100-120°F. A pressure pot (which can be made for around $100) could be used to force resin into the Opal. It isn't going to be doing anything crazy, but can be used to pressurize a piece to around 60-80 PSI. Resin casting is pretty fun, and Opal is my favorite gemstone so I clicked immediately, hope to see this followed up!!
Man this really changed my view of synthetic opal. I always thought it was just a cheap imitation that used resin and iridescent hollow plastic sheet pieces. It almost is like the real thing.
this gave me a new appreciation of opal. ive never know it had the colorful properties, and being an October baby i was kind of disappointed as a kid when it looked like milk in rock form, turns out id just never seen it from the right angle
Oh yes! You've just reminded me, perhaps not quite raw because i seem to recall its on ham too? i havent paid attention like you did Alice so still dont know why. Thats what happens on here though, you start looking up one subject and ending up watching something completely different...just like now..I certainly didnt come on here to look up how to make opals! haha
opals are my favorite stones, and I miss wearing opal jewelry so much. I 've always wanted to try making my own opals and bismuth, but I don't have the room to make a proper setup for either. This is awesome!!!!
As a chemistry student that loves pretty crystals I'm really interested in doing some more research into this process. You've done an awesome job at explaining what you're doing and linking the research. Keep up the good work 😊
@@ThatOneLadyOverHereI did try it today when I felt restless and panicked though not 7-11 because I couldn't manage that. It did help 😊 Focussing on my breathing instead of on being panicked calmed me down and I was able to keep working. I will definetly keep practicing so it comes more natural in the future 😊
@@daniquem.2510 I'm glad you felt better, breathing definitely helps a lot. Your original comment was a while ago, but I was asking about making synthetic opals. 😄
@@ThatOneLadyOverHere I totally reacted to the wrong comment 😂 I haven't tried it yet because my uni hasn't had the lab capacity during covid. I probably won't have the opportunity in a while but hopefully in the future!
Have you seen the colour changing transparent foil, made originally by 3M? I heard it had 72 layers, but is still very thin. I bought a roll of it some years ago, and made lots of decorative items.
I’d suggest using HXTAL-NYL 1 as a casting epoxy. It’s a standard adhesive for joining glass and ceramics in conservation, so won’t yellow over time, and I can attest from personal experience that it has alarmingly low viscosity, and will sprint up and down any crack or nook and cranny you have, so would be perfect to consolidate your synthetic opal.
I recall reading about a process that imitated the natural formation, filtering a silica solution through soil and passing a strong electrical current through it. As I recall, it took several months, so patience was required. Would be fun to experiment with different solutions and processes.
2:40 HARD NOT TOUGH!! There is a difference. Hardness is resistance to scratching, while toughness is resistance to breaking/shattering. Diamond is hard, but it is surprisingly not very tough. The structure of diamond is such that if you hit it (even tap it), or drop it on the floor at just the right angle, it will shatter into a million pieces. Diamond cutting is a very precarious art with lots of care taken into consideration as a result. Also, if you are wondering, jade, especially nephrite, is the toughest natural material. It is able to withstand a lot of chucking and/or crush attempts, and remain unscathed for the most part, perhaps have only a chip if done hard enough.
Your "stupidity" made me giggle out loud, for way too long, in front of many up tight, stressed out, last minute Christmas shoppers... You 'rock'! Thanks!
One thing you want to try is stabilizing resin. Peter brown used it a few times to stabilize bread. It's a very thin resin that is heat set, so you place the porous object you want to make hard into the stabilizing resin, and then draw a vacuum to extract as much air as possible. Then under atmospheric pressure the resin is forced into the voids of the product, which is baked to cure the resin. It may be possible to place the uncured object into a pressure chamber which is then heated, to further drive penetration of the resin before curing.
Hope you can make another video detailing the Lenny Cram method of opal growing, it totally eliminates the columns of color and almost perfectly recreates natural opal with no need to use high pressure chambers to fill in the gaps in the opal after synthesis. I've tried to understand it myself, but im no chemist lol.
Thinking about it the three most likely ways I can come up with for making the band structures less obvious are: 1: Agitate it occasionally to change the settling pattern 2: Tilt the container occasionally to change the direction of gravity 3: Use a mix of slightly different particle sizes, or multiple separate mixtures with different sized particles from each other.
I have a suggestion as to which resin to use: you could give it a try with dental composite resin. It has two main advantages: It can be obtained in a quite thin consistency, and it has a really low coefficient of expansion. The do this because it would obviously be bad to have it expand/contract too much in a tooth because that would cause issues, but it might just be exactly what you need here.
Specifically, I'm talking about vinylcyclopropane derivates. Another benefit I forgot to mention is that they can also be cured with UV, so you can just wait for a while until it's completely diffused into the Opal.
How about cyanoacrylate? Provided nothing used in the opal has a catalysing effect, it should cure harder & not discolor from long term exposure to UV.
@@kaisersose5549 The main issue with Cyanacrylate based polymers is that they show significant shrinkage upon curing, which can easily break the delicate Opal structure from the inside.
@@doyale2 Fair enough... If cyanoacrylate cured all at once. Wouldn't the internal stresses be greatly reduced by a complete encapsulation, as was done with the epoxy resin? That should spread the force of contracting across the external shell of cyanoacrylate (as curing happens from the outside to the inside), then actually hold the stone in place as the inside cures.
Great video! One correction, sintering does not involve melting, although there can be some melting of material during a sintering process, but not with silica, as silica melts around 1700 C (over 3000 F). I also love synthetic gems as they are the true gem material, not an artificial substitute.
Hi! I'm Russian and was intrigued by you mentioning Russian researchers, so then I started looking for those papers myself. I found a particularly interesting book on that subject where they tried to figure out the way Gilson made his opals. If it's any help, I can try to translate it for you even though I'm definitely not a chemist :D
![[DRAGON BALL LEGENDS REVEALS ＆ STUFF] LEGENDS FESTIVAL 2024 Special Edition Part 1](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/mV5bGIswTtQ/mqdefault.jpg)
No way! I spent a long time looking into synthetic opal production some years ago and never was able to uncover the secretive process. I've got an opalized fossil collection myself. Man this is great. Thank you
Looking forward to seeing your take on it.
you should do it, I'd love to see your video about it!
Now it's your job to figure out how to stop the tiger stripes. Can't be much harder than when you figured out starlight!!
Synthetic gems are always interesting
I've found a Russian patent about an inductrial production process for making opals. They let regular quartz grow in an autoclave, and then they heat-treat it to let it develop microcracks, and those microcracks have the same diffraction effects as real opal.
So they make a big piece of ordinary quartz, then cut into small pieces. The pieces get covered in sand, and they get slowly heated up to 550°C. They mention 2 methods:
1) slowly heat it up with 10°/hour, keep it at 550° for 4 hours, and they let it cool at 10° per hour; in their testing this gave a failure rate (fractured gems) of 1%.
2) in their high volume runs they let it heat by 60°/hour, keep it at 550° for 15 hours, and let it cool at 60°/h; but that gives failure rates of up to 5%.
All the heat-treated gemstones become opalescent+white (even the fractured ones).
So *you could try this process yourself with store-bought quartz,* that should work out as far as I can tell... So they used quartz that was grown at 30-32MPa, 300°C in a solution of 7-10% NaCO3 and 0.5-1% NaOH. They say that this is the standard way for industrial quartz production.
If you succeed: put the opal into your batman projector, i'm curious to see how that will look.
Question: Where does one purchase a friend with a fully-equipped science lab in his back yard?
Alabama
Canada
Andrew’s basement
The dark web
@@aliceplays5092 yes
I just realized that most chemistry videos are technically "reaction vids".
XD
That joke made you officially a dad.
That’s awful!! Take my like
that's the biggest mind frick i ever had to deal with-
God damnit I actually laughed at a dad joke
I know this video is very old and someone else might have given you the secret.
But to avoid that vertical banding in synthetic opals. When you dry it over months you want the container to tilt along the vertical axis by around 5-15 degrees over 4-7 days as it settles. You can also have it Roll around the axis slowly over the same time.
That's a really clever idea!
It's wild that when I heard him say that, my suggestion would've been to do just that lmao. Like if the settling causes the striatiions, just agitate it ever so slightly: just enough to stop the patterning, but not so much as to completely disrupt the delicate process
@@ghstgirl4982 What I thought too! The stripes are due to the same inputs leading to the same outputs, so if we slightly alter the inputs, that should change the outputs enough to break up the tiger stripes. Interesting that you only need a tiny amount of tilting, and equally surprised that it occurs over a pretty short period of time- less than (or up to) a week of time, during a months-long drying process
Awww, I’m sad...I was really hoping I could do this at home with my KitchenAid mixer and my stove. 😞
You can grow Ruby’s
@@alexgarcia8365 how
@@alexgarcia8365 💖
@@onnie6431 night hawking light has a video on it
@@masonhunter2748 what are you even talking about?
Next episode: How I made tomato sized diamonds
Hey there 'inetza' what is your next project?
Son of tesla getting ideas again. Waiting in suspense for your next vid Integza, stay awesome.
You have a love-hate relationship with tomatoes, don't you.
@@evanmagill9114 As a child, Santa gave him tomatoes if he misbehaved
time to 3D print your own opal
Synthetic opals are extremely popular in the high end glass market. Typically they're encased in a glass which magnifies the stone and makes them even more beautiful. They can also be crushed into dust and inlayed into the glass. It basically looks like the most incredible glitter you've ever seen.
Glitter²
And you can get a cool gold chain with diamond that looks amazing for $20 at walmart as well to go with it.
I want to see this crushed opal in glass SO bad now. What could I google search to find pics of this? Searching 'crushed opal in glass' only leads me to finding Google image results of little baggies of the stuff. But I'm now INFINITELY curious to see this stuff in glasswear now 👀👀
synthetic opal is encased in glass to simulste the hardness of real opal, which is akin to glass!
@@laurenspinelli6898 try searching glassware with opal dust or glass pendant with opal dust :)
“Opal comes in a few flavors.”
Finally…. Someone else who has a taste for gemstones 😂
Sounds like synesthesia to me
@@RobertLee337CancelProof it was a joke.
*crunching on chalk* eh?
I said almost the exact same thing.
Finally. A professional.
BrO.....sTaPh
Thought Emporium, NileRed and Applied Science in a single vide?!?!?! Now this is epic
All-star video
Three of my favourite channels in one video :)
Mentions of Peter Brown too! Not the same type of content at all, but still a great content creator
And SmarterEveryDay
No it’s fate
I now want to make synthetic opal bathroom tiles.
probably easiest to stick to holographic tiles...
Right I am over here thinking If I can modify this to coat ceramic Pottery with it.
I think it would really pretty if the opal was speckled in
I was thinking countertops.
🤔 synthetic opal kitchen and bath company comming when?
"Cactus Juice" resin should solve your problem. Its a low viscosity, thermally set, resin which is generally used for stabilising wood. Lots of tutorials on how to use it online. I've used it before and it works fantastically.
Ooo i hope he sees this! Resin is such a odd beast
I was coming into the comments to suggest the same
I second the Cactus Juice suggestion.
It's the juiciest
Bahaha avatar reference?
Try stabilizing the opals by saturating them with Starbond Thin CA glue instead of epoxy resin. It's generally used with wood but it's water thin and will saturate the opal way better and will leave it with a high gloss finish just like resin. It's completely clear.
Wth
"Opal comes in a few flavors"
_F-flavors?_
Forbidden m&m
@@psi9899 please don't eat the shiny thing
Feed
I was like ummm no one noticed that
But really, they're all delicious.
I don’t know, “is a pretty rock” seems good enough for me.
20:20 Hey! Resin artist here hope I'm not too late!
So to stabilize a piece of opal in resin you may want to invest in a pressure pot to force the resin into the pours of the stone. If it can take the pressure this process with two part epoxy may be your best bet!
Or for the UV resin you have- if the atone can't withstand the pressure pot; try soaking the opal overnight in UV resin in a dark black room then cure the next day. That way the thicker resin has time to become a puzzle piece.
*** Third option is catalyst epoxy. It creates its own heat while curing so I'm not sure how it will work for you. It's a very thin resin and has a quick curing time. But it could be a good experiment!
Loved the video and hope this helps ✌
Amazing, thanks for sharing!
that would crack the opal
😎👍
love it .....also always caeful with catalyst epoxys...not a resin artist but construction worker...andyou have to know material tolerances and how it will react TO the reaction taking place on it....either way great tips....gonna save these for later 👍
I am a resin artist also, and I use Liquids Diamonds, it's so thin. It's by The Epoxy Resin Store (don't forget the word "The" or you end up someplace different), I've never seen a resin so thin before and because of that so few bubbles in the end. But I have to wait for it to thicken for my wall art pieces.
What about stabilizing resin?
editing to add this info: Stabilizing resin is *designed* to seep into porous things such as wood. Put them into a pressure chamber to help reduce bubbles and hopefully reduce breakage. I believe Peter Brown (since you mentioned him) has used it a small handful of times on his channel.
I was gonna mention this as well. Especially the pressure pot as opposed to vacuum since it penetrates more.
Me: “Oh I’m gonna try to grow some opals at home cool!”
Thought Emporium 4 minutes through the video: “…and all we need is some silicon nano particles.”
The prices on the s.n.particles vary wildly.
Me too!
Making them with polymer clay can be very pretty and takes little time and money. I too, wanted to make some like in this video, though 😕
You're a lifesaver
you can make fake ones with resin and a sheer iridescent powdered coloring
Man, between the synthetic rubies and this, I *so* want to start making gemstone dice. They'd look so cool and would probably sell for a lot
I would also like to see them, if you ever make them.
Use resin. It can look so real. Commented in beginning of vid. Oops I think he's about to use resin. Lol
they do lol. unless getting fancy schmansy, most people spend 15-20 bucks on a set of dice. well done stone die are about that price for a single 18mm D20
First thing is dont post that for ppl to steal your idea
Add me to the mailing list, please
"Can you grow opals"
Me: Ferb I know what we're going to do today
I was very interested until he started talking about the 10,000 psi thing. I'm still interested, but I guess I won't be able to "just" wait 7 months to get results I want.
@Bob Pearce dont keep doing this man, youll get a lot of hate for correcting people
@Bob Pearce Dude, even the guy in the video has said opals. It doesn't matter.
Yeees hahaha
*F E R B*
Most the synthetic opals I've found (since I LOVE opal and have been looking this stuff up for years) are usually just held together with resin.
You can even find companies that sort their products by % resin.
I love it when all the science guys help each other, it's just so wholesome and amazing!
sounds like "random science avengers" to me
it only takes not listening to the 'finance guy' and the 'politician'. coming from a real science guy lol
@@LoloThomas science avengers, that was genius.
Agreed, wouldn't the world be so much better if everybody collaborated for a better shared understanding instead of competed for worthless paper rectangles and all of the unpleasant shared side effects that comes from that?
How can we bring about the conditions that lead to the Handover of societal Norms to the scientists instead of the parasitical politicians money Junkies power mongers and megalimaniacomaniacs with aspirations of world domination without having to go full out 12 Monkeys?
"as the inversed opal has way more uses than just; is a pretty rock. Like energy storage, electrodes, etc." He said bored...
Making gemstones is like modern day alchemy.
Chemistry is the direct descendant of alchemy. If you arrange sand in a particular way it can do math better than you (a chip). Don't tell me that ain't magic.
Science is magic that works reliably.
What Yoten said. Chemistry is the modern day equivalent of alchemy broadly.
@@arnaudmenard5114 I don’t remember who said it but someone sait that there are two types of magic. They are magic we use to describe why something happens(chemistry) and magic that we just believe bc why not(religion)
@@arucane8635 exurb1a
As a South Australian listening to you pronounce Coober Pedy is murdering my ears but thank you for mentioning us. It’s also pretty tragic that they’ve found fossils here that aren’t worth as much as their opal value so they get destroyed.
Yes, Cooper Pedy is pronounced koo-buh pee-dee
Not the fossils 😢
@Kitinelli I thought yall were tough down there. Didn't know words would hurt ya.
@@FloopyNupers Brother, what if someone started pronouncing your name absolutely horrid. Pretty sure it would annoy ya a little
@@soogynoodle id laugh
"What color is Opal?"
"Yes."
It's considered iridescent
@@El_bean.er777 r/wooosh
@@josephdavison4189 r/ihavereddit
Uh oh! Reddit moment!
@UDG r/ourreddit
At the start of the video, "ya, I wanna make myself an opal." At the end, "nope not for me" XD
same, at first I thought this was gonna be some easy DIY thing
One can hear the words are being spoken in English all the way through the video but after 3 mins my concentration went as if he was talking in tongues! But for those who can pay attention, its brilliant im sure! thumbs up.
I'm soooo glad it wasn't just me. I thought this was gonna be an ingredient list from walmart kind of DIY, not a "i have an entire professional science lab at my disposal, no big deal" DIY xD
Scientists making synthetic opal:
“What are we doing again?”
“I dunno but it looks cool.”
I imagine quite a few cool things came out of this process.
I can see this happening.
*looks at opal particles*
“I haven’t had dippin dots in forever”
400
@Hellequin Maskharat gunpowder what supposed to be the elixir of life
The irony of alchemy
For resins, try Opticon. You actually soak the opal in part A for awhile, then add the hardener to the stone (not the part A). Look at Emerald treatment for hints, but you do cover some of it at the end. Pressure AND Vacuum are more ideal. Warmed part A make penetration better.
I appreciate this guy actually giving the answer!
One idea instead of using a vacuum chamber to pull the air out of the opals (as the opal may be hanging onto the air inside too well for the vacuum to be strong enough to pull it out through the resin) may be to use a pressure pot instead to compress the air inside so the resin can fill in the empty voids. It will still leave you with air in the opal, but it will be crushed down to the point where it probably will be unnoticeable.
Another idea which I just got while writing this was to pull the vacuum on the opal first, to pull the air out of it, then add the resin on top of the opal while under vacuum. This may require a device to hold a cup of resin in the chamber and tip it into the cup with the opal remotely. Once you open the chamber with the opal submerged still in liquid resin the resin should be pulled into the opal due to the pressure differential inside the opal compared to the atmosphere.
There are definitely thinner resins on the market that will help you in this task as well.
Your first idea with the pressure pot is on a good path. Using a thin resin and the pressure pot may be useful.
The second won't work very well. When you are pulling a vacuum on the resin, it doesn't release air trapped inside it. Instead, it is essentially boiling off the VOC's that are in the resin before any of the air can escape. At a later point you may finally be pulling any air within the opal out, which if you are letting the opal/resin cure under vacuum, the resin will have no force pushing/pulling it into the opal. Degassing then re-pressurizing as seen in the video just won't work due to the forces needed to move the resin.
He could try stabilizing with cactus juice stabilizer which is much thinner and is used under vacuum, but needs to be baked to cure it.
Until you release the external pressure and you stone explodes.
@@MGgoose1 I never said you should let it cure under vacuum, that's not a good idea. You should dunk the opal in resin under vacuum but release the vacuum while the resin is still liquid to be pulled into the opal from the pressure differential when releasing the vacuum. As I already pointed out.
@@tedtrower9260 No, that's not how that works. Curing resin under pressure to squash air bubbles infinitesimally small does not lead to the resin, or whatever matrix is embedded in the resin, to explode.
@Switch & Lever: This agrees with my understanding as well. Cure under pressure in order to minimize bubbles and drive (thin) resin into the part. A quick vacuum before curing under pressure may help get rid of large bubbles adhering the surface of the part.
@MGoose1: VOCs shouldn't be much of an issue with epoxy resin. Polyester resin has high VOCs.
I love opal, it's so pretty. And I NEVER EVER knew that opal could combine with wood naturally. It's so pretty! 😍
You should check out opalized Yowah nut, the structure is gorgeous.
I’ve gone opal mining at Lightning Ridge and pulling these beauties out of the ground and into the sunlight is unparalleled!
Best in the world from there.
You deserve huge credit for your patience in drying , sanding, and spinning. The results were terrific.
If you do end up getting a drying chamber like that I recommend renting some industrial space outside the city and maybe getting an engineer consultant to double check your numbers.
Just in case you create a bomb...
It might even be worth the money (though tbh I am not sure how expensive that would be, compared to homebuilding it) to pay to have it professionally manufactured. I dunno about you, but for me "not accidentally blowing myself up" has a pretty high value
@@zuthalsoraniz6764 its not actually hard to make these things reliably safe.
a professional engineer and manufacturer could build you a large pressure chamber that is no heavier than it needed to be. has the most convenient access system that is safe and doesn't waste materials or manufacturing time. but it will be expensive and hard to mod
a skilled amateur will build a smaller chamber, with thicker walls, just to be on the safe side, getting samples in and out will probably be harder but being so familiar with it it will be easier to modify for other projects.
Putting it in a hole in the ground is always a good choice.
Up until my fiance bought be an opal flower ring, I never gave much thought about their beauty. What is so beautiful about them is that something in nature is this beautiful and captivating and is naturally made by the Earth. It is so cool that it isn't one set color. And it matches absolutely everything you wear because it seems to reflect certain colors more when it is near any color. It really is a captivating stone.
Right?! Nature has so many beautiful Things and probably even Mode we don't even know of. So inspiring
Christa - opal was my favourite stone at one point. Now it is one among many favourites. Watermelon tourmaline, adventurine, mother of pearl, pearl, there are many fascinating optical effects in various minerals - chatoyancy, tiger eye effects, tha many stones that show various forms of asterism, the stones that are different colors in different light, stones that are a different color with reflected vs transmitted light, ctones like Labradorite, pleichroism, etc. - lots of fun, attractice stuff.
Opals are one of the most delicate stones, in ancient jewelry that had opals the stone hasusually dried out and crumbled. Pearl is also somewhat delicate but not nearly as delicate as opal. There is a mine out west that is open to the public that is loaded with large, beautiful opals, but they are useless as jewelry as the stones immediately deteriorate if not kept wet - they are mined just for the fun of it.
Check out bismuth crystals
Thing I like best about mine is even a few years later i still see new things,when I heard you always see something new I was sceptical but 100% the most beautiful natural stone/gemstone I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in minerals or stones you won't regret it even with the price tag lol
@@deandeann1541 I love how Alexandrite flashes purple or green depending on the lighting you're in. My mom told me when I got an opal ring that I needed to rub it on my face to oil it to keep it from drying out, and I did faithfully, until I found out that most opals (even natural ones) are sealed for use in jewelry these days...
But both chemically and physically speaking, pearls are WAY more sensitive, not only will the oils of your skin naturally change their color, but even MAKE UP can damage their luster (by scratching them) But don't take my word for it, just see how an opal vs a pearl react to red wine spilled on them and blotted off right away....
Blue, grey and green eyes are also an example of structural color. Great vid.
That's cooI didn't know that
@@thomastruant8837 www.nature.com/articles/jhg2010126#:~:text=Abstract,the%20classical%20paths%20of%20inheritance.&text=Therefore%2C%20single-nucleotide%20polymorphisms%20in,eye%20color%20of%20an%20individual.
You deserve so much praise and recognition for your literal MONTHS of effort and beautiful results. EXCELLENT video, you did a great job!!
I love how you just casually mentioned you probably made diamond
I am a certified high pressure vessel welder. I volunteer my time and skills
A wessel?
@@BurninGems an autoclave. Vessel hollow container, especially one used to hold liquid, such as a bowl or cask. A pressure vessel is typically inches thick steel that can contain or resist great atmospheric pressure or hydraulic pressure.
You should sell it for sure
@@grendal113 He was trolling.. Star-Trek Russian kid "Wessel".
"Opal comes in a few flavors"
Me: I-
My brain: Don't.
do not do it it hurts in the way out talking from personal experience
Put the shiny smooth rocks in your mouth, _right now! Do it!_
🤣😂
Oh my God, dude.
Please write screenplays. Thank You!
opal might actually come in useful for data encryption. powdered opal, when shaken, moves around and glitters differently. if taken picture of and encoded into text, it might come in handy as an encryption key, which is the tool needed to encrypt and decrypt information.
I think lava lamps might be enough for now
@@InfestedSlab its so random though, and im pretty sure a 10cm2 box of opal powder will do the trick
Just use nail polish in a bottle. Got a topcoat full of iridescent hexagons of different sizes which when you shake/move it changes drastically. Though that one (Wizard Lizard by Colores de Carol) is perhaps a little too heavily packed to get it to change as easily as a less packed one. The base is quite thick. But still, that's easier & cheaper than getting a box of opal powder.
No
Oh wow, I got hella confused when I saw NileRed's flasks. Nice to see collaboration. NileRed is one of my favorite chemistry channels.
I've looked at some Russian research, and I've found a simpler method to make Opals. The trick is to grow quartz in an autoclave, and then heat-treat it to let it develop microcracks.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
The idea is let the quartz grow at 298°C at 30.5MPa in a solution of 1%NaOH and 10%Na2CO3, and it will grow with a speed of 0.4mm per 24 hours.
However during a prototype run with smaller quantities, they grew quartz at 326° 32.3MPa, 0.5%NaOH and 7%Na2CO3, with slightly faster growing rates.
The big chuck of quartz is then cut into small pieces. The pieces get covered in sand, and they get slowly heated up to 550°C. In the testrun they let it heat up 10° every hour, they kept it at 550° for 4 hours, and they let it cool at 10° per hour; with this process
you can possibly do that with a fairly normal pottery kiln
@@p.f.3014 Yeah!
Well, the 2nd part is fairly simple: just bury it in sand and slowly heat up while controlling the temp. We're talking about any sand, and atmospheric pressure.
But the process of growing quartz at 30Mpa is a bit trickier, that's 300 times our atmospheric pressure... You're probably better off getting commercially made synthetic quartz, which is not that expensive. But the quartz that you buy, should be made under the conditions that I mentioned.
.
Can you sand research for it?
@@Richard-ed7tf
Alright, let's see.
Patent RU2132414C1 is, afaik what I talked about in this comment 3 years ago.
Other russian research papers use TEOS, to create nanoparticles to grow opals.
You mentioned this over a year ago and it's finally happened. Thank you for not giving up on it. Looking forward to the sapphire video!
Have you tried running some soundwaves through the container as it sets its pattern? Maybe the 7.83 hz that is supposed to be the Earth's frequency. It'd be interesting to see if you could dial in different patterns or stacking of the particles.
Man that's interesting. I wonder what would happen.
It would probably mess up the opals shiny construct. Sound is vibration, vibration is constant movement. Like he said the samples sat still for months n the one time he tried motion it turned into a white chunk. So sound probably wouldnt be the way to go but its worth a shot. Maybe some sort of low range sounds possibly.
Also i just thought this, if you put sound directly around with the sample at the center, i can imagine the molecules being pushed away from the walls concentraded to a center, possibly creating an interesting piece of opal.
@@ppierson4126Some sort of resonance frequency may well be the "trade secret" to avoiding the characteristic tiger striping...
Someone needs to try it and let me know. Cause the physics off applied heay and pressure arent nor have to be so extreme as most gems to grow. So besides heat n preassure, resonance is the only other idea i have. It may take some trial n error but i can say id deffiniely go for lower frequency. Lower frequency less vibration. High frequency and you got an earth quake turning the mix into that whitw not as pretty rock.
I REALLY hope you'll be making that drying chamber. Gemstones are one of my favourite subjects, so it'd be incredibly interesting to see you make more.
How To Make Cheath Opals:
First you need 200k equitment and 5k materials and PhD in chemistry and geology
Then you can make very cheap opal gems at home, YAY!!
Not true. You'd be amazed at what a cpl guys in back room of a straw hut in India or Thailand can do. They rip off unsuspectingvtourists for $100s/$1000 for pennies. A little cathode tube ( green TV picture tube) a cpl 7 up bottles add handful of graphite pull the glass as it cools= bam ! Fake emeralds w nat looking inclusions & striations. Add a touch of beryllium to quartz in standard pressure cooker, fake morganite/ orange sapphire.
Or look up the patents and figure it out from that...
@Beauty Queen by making a gem you mean cutting a genuine stone? I'm studying gemology to become a gemologist. I'm doing the colored stone course. Not just diamonds. Its tough. We did a lab on treatments synthetics & simulants. Theres so many minerals.
This ended up on my feed sparked my intrest. There's more efficient ways than chem composite. IE Flame fusion, diffusion, hydrothermal, etc.
I was a nerdy kid.🤓
You don't need PhD. This stuff has p much all been covered in my bachelor nanotechnology course
@@Noelciaaa Don't even need that. You'd be amazed what 2 guys, propane tank, NO EDU in grass hut can do. Ebay is full of them.
Never confuse formal EDU for intelligence.
2:34 "Jesus Christ, Marie! They're minerals!"
mistr whit
shutnup n jesser
I feel like that non-tigerstripe pattern might have a mechanic solution, where during the setteling process the opal is disturbed ever so slightly to knock some of the structure and force it to stack in different ways. Just a theory, of course, but it does seem the most organic to me.
@Isabelle Jiang considering how delicate the pellet supposedly is, that might be a little hard to achieve... but possible, none the less
@Isabelle Jiang Or maybe taking some other crystals, like the air dried bits and mixing them in as it settles?
I was wondering about this, or possibly siphoning the solution off after a while and replacing it with another "color" of the solution. Alternately, maybe putting an uneven surface at the bottom of the settling chamber, so they have different planes to stack against?
Just trying to think about how these things might form in nature, rate of settling, movement, and "substrate" could all affect the pattern.
Agree. Trying to think of something that would have been practical in the 70s. Someone mentioned sound waves, but that seems a stretch for that time period.
Seems obvious to connect the vertical pattern to gravity, but maybe I'm missing something.
But perhaps, a way to rotate it extremely slowly, even incrementally while it settles. Like suspended by a multi-axis yoke like for mounting a globe. Either keep it moving at a snail's pace, or use stepper motors to move it slowly, randomly a few degrees at a time over the course of an hour/day and then stop and let it settle a bit in each new position for a week or whatever the time needs to be.
I learned more in this video than an actual chemistry class. You’re an amazing teacher!
So basically what you are saying is that you didn't pay attention in chemistry class.
To avoid the streaking effect, can you form the final product in 2 steps. create one product with the aligned striations, fracture that into bits, then use those bits along with more nanoparticles to fill in the gaps to make a second product. Now all those striations from the first product should be randomized when the second product forms.
scientists: make gemstones for little money
the entire jewelry industry: im gonna pretend i didn't see that
Why do you think diamonds cost so much?
@@anoaboadosaro Yay! Artificial scarcity and inhumane mining practices!
The thing is, many gemstones (especially diamond) are a lot cheaper to get out of the earth than you end up paying for them. Because clearly "high quality" means it came from a f**king hole in the ground!
@@Guru_1092 yeah, diamonds aren't that rare. It's the companies that made it like this. Did you know Africa, the country that has most of the diamonds doesn't even make 1/10 of the money from the diamonds that companies make.
@@wesleymays1931 not necessarily . The diamonds made in lab actually have higher quality crystalline structure than even the finest natural diamonds. There is no such thing as a high quality diamond,only people trying to make money by selling lies.
perhaps the best stabilizer may be a heat activated wood stabilizer. These are made for penetration and are low viscosity. However, the principle of vacuum stabilization presupposes that there are air pockets in the material which will be evacuated by inducing a vacuum. When the vacuum is released the stabilization fluid penetrates into these voids which previously held air. I suspect there will be minimal penetration into an opal pellet which holds no fractures or voids (aka centrifuge sample). Other ways of stabilization may involve the introduction of trace amounts of aluminum after the microspheres have formed and just before centrifugation. A kaolite clay solution could be centrifuged beforehand with the wet-but-decanted pellet left in place and the opal microsphere solution carefully layered on top before it is centrifuged. This may provide trace aluminum and magnesium as well as yield a flat pellet rather than a pointed one because the nose of the tube was prefilled. Final suggestion? Place the pellet in the center of a ball of clay, wrap that in a layer of cotton and place the whole of it in a ziplock bag and forget about it for a year. This will allow for very, very slow migration of water out of the opal as the ball loses water through the plastic. This is an old trick for high water content opal that crazes after being taken from the ground.
Opals: *"I'm NOT liKe thE oTher GemS."*
I can’t tell if this is a Steven universe reference or not, probably because I avoid the show
@@josephdavison4189 you know the "not like other girls" memes? Yeah.
I have ***Snake Arms***
yes
@Sturza Vadim Except it's not a lie 🤫😃
bro, this is blowing my mind. I've always wondered why roast beef can be sheen-y.
I thought I was crazy in seeing a rainbow in my meat. XD
I'm already bored cuz this is all so over my head but if the answer to the roast beef mystery is solved, I'm gonna hang in there! Always wondered about that😎
Yes, roast beef northern lights!
Now I want to make miniatures out of Opal through an injection mold
you could make some with resin and holographic powder...
Injection molding won't help, you can just use some molds and put in the opalescent water inside them (with a long vertical tube so that there would be enough particles for the whole nold)
Fun fact: William Lawrence Bragg was born in Adelaide, South Australia. The main reason it's a "fun fact" is that South Australia supplies at least 80% of the world's supply (the rest of Australia supplies maybe 75% of the rest); it's nice to see the South Australian physicist (either him or his father) involved with explaining the gemstone so common to the state.
"...as it can react in your lungs and coat them in silica"
Well that sounds like a horrifying way to die.
Your eyes too.
I will turn myself into living stone!
worse, you don't die you just raise your cancer risk and spend a week coughing up some nasty stuff. I worked with nano silica and you cough bricks if you aren't really careful handling it.
@@LeonardGreenpaw Flint Marco.
But it will look so pretty during the autopsy, so…
...it might be worth it?
That was awesome! Can't wait to see your take on the ruby production!
Thats easy. There are several methods. Chatham diffusion is best. The flame fusion, hydrothermal growth techniques using natural seed synthetic mtrls. LGF using natural conundrum, & is more of a filler technique. We'll see what he chooses.😁
@@roberttyrrell2250 flame fusion is by far the easiest for DIY
why not the rest.
Pretty sure the microwave is now the easiest :-)
can't you make cheap industrial ruby in a microwave with a crucible?
SiO2 Nanoparticle specialist here: I unfortunately also do not have an idea to solve the drying issue without proper equipment but I suggest you to make as huge of a piece as possible by sedimentation and pray that it breaks into huge bits so you can still use those. For filling up the gaps you might also use TMOS instead of TEOS which can be easily hydrolyzed with just water to it's roughly 1000x higher reactivity in comparison to it's Ethanol-brother. it also happens to have a much higher solid content (TEOS=28-29%, TMOS= 39-40%) so by using an RoR value of ~1.0, which is easily enough to hydrolyze all Me-O-Si groups, you would only need to let the gaps soak in that solution a couple of times to ensure they're filled completely. TMOS forms a gel fairly quickly after its reaction with water so working fast is requested. Don't shy away of using your vacuum chamber to make it soak faster. You might also use some kind of monomer found in plastic production which is more liquidy than a resin and polymerize it after soaking the raw-Opal in it. Maybe a polyaddition or radical polymerization would suit it quite well... polycondensation is a little tricky as you can see on the TMOS example since you force a shrinkage and might have to repeat the process several times. I do not know which monomers are comercially available unfortunately :( I might also try this out in my own lab! At least I own spherical Nanoparticles in all sizes... lets see where this leads to! Avoiding these tiger stripes looks like quite a challenge... maybe they disturbed the sedimentation just so much so the partickes align differently aftterwards by heat or vibration or whatever but these are just guesses. overall really good video! Enjoyed watching it quite a bit.
"Tiger stripes" occur in natural opal, too.
OMG! THANK YOU! You have just answered a lifelong question I’ve wondered about since I was little. The iridescence of turkey lunch meat. I just figured they were adding a hint of gasoline or some other sketchy chemicals. What a relief.
13:00 holy shit, I was a butcher for a few years and always wondered why the beef knuckles always shined like that. thank you so much.
I've always wondered about it too, looking at roast beef slices. Crazy.
@@benmcreynolds8581 ah yes, *R A I N B O W M E A T*
Every time I see that pattern of beef I get grossed out 😅
me getting stupidly excited over seeing nilered, my favorite chemistry nerd
Same😅
hsghdgsgshhs same lol
@@hanaaulia.x me too
The greatest crossover of all time
Relatable
_"Opal comes in a few flavours"_
Be me: *hungry* 👁️👄👁️
Ngl I think they'd taste really good
Me not being able to eat bc of strep ;-;
@@danidarkoxo same here!! I've gotten past the worst part thanks to antibiotics :3
Hope you get better soon
They look so good...
Fr same it looms delicous
This is such an old video, but I actually have a piece of lab-grown opal without that pattern! It's wild knowing the process that went behind making it, and even crazier knowing that the process for mine is probably even more complicated.
He spends a day at Nile, and starts to talk like him: sand in lungs: "Which isn't particularly healthy". No hyperboles. Just like Nile.
Nilered and you? Holy shit this is my dream.
wait there's a super new nile red one?
and applied science.
And even Peter Brown!
AMAZING. I was up all last night looking up papers on the Gilson process and was so upset that no videos existed on it. You Rock!
When it comes to resin casting, from my experience UV resin has a tendency to expand slightly on curing so I typically don't use it. Instead I use a brand or two part resin I found on Amazon called Shebebe, mostly because it was cheap, degasses readily, is very clear and reasonably thin. Of course if it needs to be thinner, there are additives, but you can also heat it with a space heater to around 100-120°F. A pressure pot (which can be made for around $100) could be used to force resin into the Opal. It isn't going to be doing anything crazy, but can be used to pressurize a piece to around 60-80 PSI. Resin casting is pretty fun, and Opal is my favorite gemstone so I clicked immediately, hope to see this followed up!!
Man this really changed my view of synthetic opal. I always thought it was just a cheap imitation that used resin and iridescent hollow plastic sheet pieces. It almost is like the real thing.
I suppose in Canada Nile red is now a kind of a chemical Don Carlione.
Corleone*
@@fletcherspillers9904 yeah, sure
its Corleone
@Alexander Chohan Nile is easily one of the biggest chemistry channels I have no idea what you're talking about
4:17 Ooh I love crossover episodes!!
this gave me a new appreciation of opal. ive never know it had the colorful properties, and being an October baby i was kind of disappointed as a kid when it looked like milk in rock form, turns out id just never seen it from the right angle
When I worked in a corner shop I used to look at the opalescent bacon a lot, now I know why the raw meat looked so pretty!
Oh yes! You've just reminded me, perhaps not quite raw because i seem to recall its on ham too? i havent paid attention like you did Alice so still dont know why. Thats what happens on here though, you start looking up one subject and ending up watching something completely different...just like now..I certainly didnt come on here to look up how to make opals! haha
What😨
Make some bacon opal jewelry 🥓💍
Beginning of the video: Oh it's easy?? I'm gonna try this!
End of the video: Screw that, I'll just buy one
I've always wondered why my ham looks a little gay sometimes.
😂😂😂
"I've always wondered why my ham looks a little gay sometimes." that correlation explains why i sometimes look like ham
opals are my favorite stones, and I miss wearing opal jewelry so much. I 've always wanted to try making my own opals and bismuth, but I don't have the room to make a proper setup for either. This is awesome!!!!
As a chemistry student that loves pretty crystals I'm really interested in doing some more research into this process. You've done an awesome job at explaining what you're doing and linking the research. Keep up the good work 😊
I'm curious if you did try it and if it worked.
@@ThatOneLadyOverHereI did try it today when I felt restless and panicked though not 7-11 because I couldn't manage that. It did help 😊 Focussing on my breathing instead of on being panicked calmed me down and I was able to keep working. I will definetly keep practicing so it comes more natural in the future 😊
@@daniquem.2510 I'm glad you felt better, breathing definitely helps a lot. Your original comment was a while ago, but I was asking about making synthetic opals. 😄
@@ThatOneLadyOverHere I totally reacted to the wrong comment 😂 I haven't tried it yet because my uni hasn't had the lab capacity during covid. I probably won't have the opportunity in a while but hopefully in the future!
Cactus Juice Resin might be a good option for absorption. Its used for stabilizing wood by getting absorbed into the fibres under vacuum.
I saw the notif and gasped
Seriously I'm obsessed with thin film interference and opals are my favourite ever!!
Have you seen the colour changing transparent foil, made originally by 3M? I heard it had 72 layers, but is still very thin. I bought a roll of it some years ago, and made lots of decorative items.
@@kitemanmusic omg that sounds amazing will check it out
I'm so glad you and Nile are friends. I always imagined you two would get along well
i got super excited but then realized i need to know chemistry....
Same.... Same...
I’d suggest using HXTAL-NYL 1 as a casting epoxy. It’s a standard adhesive for joining glass and ceramics in conservation, so won’t yellow over time, and I can attest from personal experience that it has alarmingly low viscosity, and will sprint up and down any crack or nook and cranny you have, so would be perfect to consolidate your synthetic opal.
I recall reading about a process that imitated the natural formation, filtering a silica solution through soil and passing a strong electrical current through it. As I recall, it took several months, so patience was required. Would be fun to experiment with different solutions and processes.
You got a link or more info ?
2:40 HARD NOT TOUGH!! There is a difference.
Hardness is resistance to scratching, while toughness is resistance to breaking/shattering.
Diamond is hard, but it is surprisingly not very tough. The structure of diamond is such that if you hit it (even tap it), or drop it on the floor at just the right angle, it will shatter into a million pieces. Diamond cutting is a very precarious art with lots of care taken into consideration as a result.
Also, if you are wondering, jade, especially nephrite, is the toughest natural material. It is able to withstand a lot of chucking and/or crush attempts, and remain unscathed for the most part, perhaps have only a chip if done hard enough.
I thought this said “How to grow an orphan”, got mad at the creator, then laughed at my stupidity...
Lmao
It isn't difficult to do
why mad?
Lol
Your "stupidity" made me giggle out loud, for way too long, in front of many up tight, stressed out, last minute Christmas shoppers...
You 'rock'! Thanks!
Didn't expect that weird rainbow shine on sliced meat to be explained in this opal video.
One thing you want to try is stabilizing resin. Peter brown used it a few times to stabilize bread. It's a very thin resin that is heat set, so you place the porous object you want to make hard into the stabilizing resin, and then draw a vacuum to extract as much air as possible. Then under atmospheric pressure the resin is forced into the voids of the product, which is baked to cure the resin. It may be possible to place the uncured object into a pressure chamber which is then heated, to further drive penetration of the resin before curing.
as a budding jewellery designer I absolutely love synthetic gems and i love knowing this :)
the thought emporium, nile red, and applied science all in the same video? this is a dream come true! and nighthawkinlight left a comment too!
I never knew where that colorful sheen on meat came from, was always curious. Structural color. Thanks!
I hope you revisit this one day. I'd love to see you make more opals and other gems.
Could you ”paint” the solution on something else to get some of the opal effect?
The thin layer did shrink a lot when he left it to dry, I guess it would just shrink off maybe.
Opal paint would be amazing!
@@healinggrounds19 sounds like my Holo Taco unicorn skin nail polish! 😆 I feel like my nails look like opals afterwards and I'm obsessed.
@@erdiaz13 i can’t escape Cristine even on the science side of RUclips 😂
@@tachthechatgoblin is that really such a bad thing though? Scientists can like fun nails too! ☺️
I just want a bathroom tiled with black synthetic opal.
I wonder if opal is strong enough to coat a car with?
@@runed0s86 lol dude you just put metal flake in car paint to get light refractions, you dont need opal
@@bmxscape what if you coated chitosan car panels with opal? It would be so much better than car paint, and wouldn't rust!
@@runed0s86 don't eat the hype, man
There is a feldspar stone that is utterly black, fiery, and beautiful
Hope you can make another video detailing the Lenny Cram method of opal growing, it totally eliminates the columns of color and almost perfectly recreates natural opal with no need to use high pressure chambers to fill in the gaps in the opal after synthesis. I've tried to understand it myself, but im no chemist lol.
Thinking about it the three most likely ways I can come up with for making the band structures less obvious are:
1: Agitate it occasionally to change the settling pattern
2: Tilt the container occasionally to change the direction of gravity
3: Use a mix of slightly different particle sizes, or multiple separate mixtures with different sized particles from each other.
I have a suggestion as to which resin to use: you could give it a try with dental composite resin. It has two main advantages: It can be obtained in a quite thin consistency, and it has a really low coefficient of expansion. The do this because it would obviously be bad to have it expand/contract too much in a tooth because that would cause issues, but it might just be exactly what you need here.
Specifically, I'm talking about vinylcyclopropane derivates. Another benefit I forgot to mention is that they can also be cured with UV, so you can just wait for a while until it's completely diffused into the Opal.
Yes
How about cyanoacrylate?
Provided nothing used in the opal has a catalysing effect, it should cure harder & not discolor from long term exposure to UV.
@@kaisersose5549 The main issue with Cyanacrylate based polymers is that they show significant shrinkage upon curing, which can easily break the delicate Opal structure from the inside.
@@doyale2
Fair enough... If cyanoacrylate cured all at once.
Wouldn't the internal stresses be greatly reduced by a complete encapsulation, as was done with the epoxy resin?
That should spread the force of contracting across the external shell of cyanoacrylate (as curing happens from the outside to the inside), then actually hold the stone in place as the inside cures.
"I'm a bit of a nutcase" I don't think anyone has ever described themselves so well in just a few words. Bravo.
My brain keeps translating "TOS" into "terms of service" which makes this sounds very weird...
Great video! One correction, sintering does not involve melting, although there can be some melting of material during a sintering process, but not with silica, as silica melts around 1700 C (over 3000 F). I also love synthetic gems as they are the true gem material, not an artificial substitute.
Hi! I'm Russian and was intrigued by you mentioning Russian researchers, so then I started looking for those papers myself. I found a particularly interesting book on that subject where they tried to figure out the way Gilson made his opals. If it's any help, I can try to translate it for you even though I'm definitely not a chemist :D
can you tell me how research in russian is called ?