Making Glass

I decided to try to make glass.  Basically glass consists of sand [silica sand], soda ash and lime heated up to a temperature high enough to "melt" these items together.

So since I live down near the Atlantic Ocean I went to my local beach and got "sand".  The beach that I live near has beautiful light tan sand. However it had a lot of impurities in it.

 

So I set about sifting and sifting...

and eventually ended up with clean sand - see below in black container.  The sand in the bag is bought white silica sand for comparison

Then I needed soda ash also known as sodium carbonate. You can get this by putting standard baking soda in your oven at 200degrees for about an hour which I did.  The last item needed is lime,and I went to my local garden store and bought it!

For the first experiment I decided to use the store bought sand

I went with the "recipe" of sand 60%; Soda ash - 30 % and lime 10 % -and mixed them together

I had bought a ceramic mold and coated it with mold release that said it was good up to 2000 degrees F.  I put the mixture into the mold

Baron Fergus got his propane forge ready for us to put it in

And it immediately cracked

Fortunately Baron Fergus has a crucible that he had used to melt various metals, so we decided to use that

into the forge

take it out and look at it...starting to melt - estimated temperature was 1700 C

Back in - unfortunately I did not time it for when we took it out again

After we had taken it out and cooled it down - this is what we had.  Not glass that I could actually use but we did prove the concept.Then we did it the same process with the beach sand.

The discoloration is due to the impurities that were in the crucible from making melting metals in it. - copper/tin/lead and pewter.

The first one that we did had more impurities in it -red and greens

Basically using the propane forge there was not that much difference in the pieces.  The bought sand had much more white coloring to it.

Then Lord Ulf the Dragon Slayer mentioned that we should try to make it with period "fire".  So he prep'd and fired up the charcoal forge

When it got hot we used a clean crucible and store bought sand mixture - after about an 1 hour it did start to melt.

We put it in longer but could not get it hot enough to really melt it...we did get a small amount of "melted" glass

When we took the crucible and put it into the propane forge we got "glass"!