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The amazing do-it-yourself clay battery. A safe battery anyone can make. Robert Murray Smith

Amazing New Device – A Rechargeable Battery Made From Earth’s Most Abundant and Safest Materials – Water and Clay – Will Last Forever And Generate

From the Amazing YouTube channel:

Robert Murray-Smith – T’n’t – Thinking ‘n’ Tinkering

 

“1956 The Amazing DIY Clay Battery – A Safe Battery Anyone Can Make”

By Robert Murray Smith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPGP1R7k-zQ

Auto-generated transcript and rewritten with chatGPT for reading clarity…

Hear this post in audio

 

Amazing New Device – A Rechargeable Battery Made From The Earth’s Most Abundant and Safest Materials – Water and Clay – Will Last Forever And Generate.

 

The materials are cheap, they’re abundant, and they’re renewable. Just Water and Clay.

 

Hi everybody. So welcome to Bishops in Glen. And it’s a site of special scientific interest mostly for the wildlife and geology. This area was actually under a shallow sea for ages and what you can see quite clearly when we look to the top, with the newer sands that have been laid down and it’s clearly banded into grades of sand until you get to the bottom where my feet are, and that’s the London clay belt.

 

So, this whole area is covered in clay. Now we can’t take clay from here because it is a protected site and one of the reasons it’s protected,… now, these little holes here in the cliffs, they’re actually bees, solitary bees. The bees come out and they paralyse their prey, drag it in there, lay some eggs, seal the hole up and it becomes a nursery and a tomb. So, there’s lots of strange animals and insects and plants here that make it a protected site, both in terms of the Zoology and in terms of the Geology.

 

Of course, we can’t dig clay out of that. That’s an area of special interest. But we come down the beach a little bit, and we come to these clay formations, and the whole hills are made out of this stuff. It’s quite dry because of the weather and it changes its colour from that sort of reddish brown, which has got lots of iron in it to this kind of silvery grey, which has got a lot more aluminium in it and of course… I’m being a little obsessive about clay right now because I’m always obsessive about the things that we can pull from nature. This exact area is where I come to collect bits and pieces in order to make solar cells. What we can do is collect the bits and pieces that we need in order to make a battery.

 

Because there are lots of different kinds of clay; you get Britain red clay tile, red clay, London yellow clay, porcelain clay, China clay, just a whole range of different types of clay that you can literally dig from the ground. And this is the same stuff. This is just the type of clay it’s called zeolite and you come across this mostly in face masks and filter material for fishponds, that kind of thing, this grade is called X13.

 

Now, something really amazing happens when you add these two things together, this clay and this water. It happens quite a lot, actually, usually not very dramatic, so you don’t notice it. What it is, is that when they’re separate like this, they have a higher energy. When you combine them, the energy is much lower and so that extra energy is given off as heat.

 

And as I say, when you’re dissolving things actually, that happens, you just don’t notice it. But when we add this to this, which doesn’t dissolve it, the water goes into the galleries of the clay. That extra energy is super, super noticeable. Of course, the immediate question is: can we do something with that?

 

And I was thinking about it because there are some awesome things you can do with it. One of the things you can do is you can take this. It’s a Peltier device, you find these in beer chillers, that sort of thing. And it’s really good for when you have a heat difference that is, cold on one side and hot on the other side. It will generate an electric current between these two wires, so if we can get something hot and something cold, we can automatically generate electricity from it, so I’ve got one here.

 

And I’ve got a little steel tin. Now this steel tin is battered about and it’s quite dented, so a thermal paste would work really well. I’m going to use a bit of graphite foil as a thermal contact. So put the foil on there. Put that on there and we have a thermal contact.

Now I’m going to add my dry clay into my steel tin. There we go.

 

And we’re going to add some water to that. So, this is just plain water. So, add some water to it. It’s going to get hot. You see, following the water immediately. Going to put that on. Give it a bit of pressure so we get a good contact between the cold marble under here and the hot tin can.

 

What I want you to do is keep your eye on that motor there, there we go. What’s happening here is that now it has a hot side from the clay and a cold side from the marble. It’s generating electricity and it’s running that motor, and it will continue to run that motor as long as there’s a difference between the hot and the cold. And of course, we’ve used clay and water.

 

I can’t repeat that often enough.

 

It’s clay that you dig out of the ground and water! If we want to recharge this… ‘Dry off the water!’ and you’ll have clay and if you actually drop it. It’ll do nothing because it’s already ground. So to get it going you add water. It’s an amazing device if you think about it, it is a rechargeable battery made from the Earth’s greatest, safest materials that will last forever and generate.

 

So that really will run for ages until that cools down. So, if I put that in a thermos, for example, it would maintain that heat difference and so this would run it even longer. This is just out in the air. So we put it in a thermos it would run it even longer.

 

The materials are cheap, they’re abundant, and they’re renewable. They’re non-caustic, they’re safe. I just can’t think of anything else to recommend it. Anyway, if you enjoyed that video, thank you very much for watching. Please remember to like and subscribe.

 

By Geoff Williams with chatGPT. 15-06-2023

zylascope.com

A Safer Way To Make DIY Fractal Wood Burner

I guess you’ve seen this or heard about it by now. In April 2022 a Wisconsin couple was electrocuted attempting a popular but dangerous wood-burning technique ‘fractal burning art’.

Fractal burning DIY videos can be found in abundance online but few of them pay much attention to safety.

Some fractal burning art is crafted by professionals with experience as electricians and access to proper equipment. But a lot of people who attempt the technique take apart microwave ovens for the transformer or car batteries to use as power sources.

The “fractal burning” technique creates lightning-like etchings by using jumper cables and disassembled microwave oven parts to run high-voltage electricity through a piece of wood soaked in a chemical solution, usually saltwater. It yields patterns known as Lichtenberg figures, named after the physicist Georg Lichtenberg, who discovered them in 1777 as he was experimenting with static electricity.

The technique is gaining popularity through viral videos on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, but woodworking experts caution that it is extremely dangerous and can be deadly.

Tanya Rodriguez, 44, and James Carolfi, 52, were found dead in a house fire on April 6. Their bodies were in the garage of their home in Marathon County, Wisconsin.

The couple had died before the fire started, and the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office initially described the cause of their deaths and the fire as “suspicious.” The mysterious circumstances prompted weeks of arson and homicide investigation, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.

The sheriff’s office, fire marshals and the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory found that Rodriguez and Carolfi died by accidental electrocution when they attempted the dangerous wood-burning technique. The couple used a disassembled microwave oven for a power supply. Authorities believe the equipment that caused the electrocutions also caused the fire, which started in the garage before it spread, the sheriff’s office said in a statement last week.

“Foul play has been ruled out, and the deaths are found to be accidental in nature and believed to be caused by electrocution from fractal wood burning,” Chief Deputy Chad Billeb said at a news conference Thursday.

At least 33 people have died from fractal burning attempts since 2016, according to the American Association of Woodturners, including an experienced electrician.

If you are considering trying the technique make sure to prepare. Here is a video where Robert Murray-Smith from The World of Thinking and Tinkering (TNT) shows how some simple add-ons can make this art technique a lot safer.

If you know anyone who is curious about this art technique please share this information with them. It could help save lives.

 

Geoff.

 

Sources:

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/wisconsin-couple-electrocuted-attempting-viral-wood-burning-art-techni-rcna26109

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/wisconsin-couple-electrocuted-attempting-viral-wood-burning-art-techni-rcna26109

The World of Thinking and Tinkering – https://www.youtube.com/c/RobertMurray