Here's my home made lava lamp. The container is simply a gallon jug wine bottle.
Because of this, a friend once referred to it as the "White Trash Lava Lamp."
The wine was Ernest
and Julio Gallo, if I remember correctly. I do remember that it stank to high heavens
when I poured it down the sink. Avoid, avoid, avoid.The base is a cheap spun aluminum sauce pan, obtained from the local 99 Cent store. The handle was removed, and a hole was cut in the bottom with a nibbling tool. You'll see no pictures of that. It's remarkably difficult to cut a circle with a nibbler. From there, it was simply a matter of rivetting a socket for a 30 watt appliance bulb onto the inside of the pan and wiring it for 110 VAC. The lamp is plugged into a 3 step touch-base type dimmer, mostly just because it was cooler than a simple switch. Just tap the base, and the lamp turns on. Plastic cable clamps were rivetted to the lip of the pan to hold the base away from the tabletop, as well as to allow some ventilation to the lamp.
Here's a close-up of the lamp in action. The "lava" in the lamp is mineral oil, the kind
sold as a laxative at your corner drugstore. The liquid above it is
an indeterminate concentration
of isopryl alcohol, AKA rubbing alcohol. I'd like to be able to tell you an exact
mixture, but it was kind of a trial-and-error operation. I started with 91% isopryl, and
added 70%, and later straight distilled water, until the meniscus of the oil/alcohol
interface started to lift. (For those of you who care, mineral oil is a non-wetting
liquid, which means the meniscus will be convex, with the center of the fluid surface
a bit higher than the edge. Let's hear it for high school chemistry!) Kind of a
touchy-feely operation, but it seemed to work well enough. It did
take a few tries, though, both because I added too much, and the oil floated completely, and
because I added too fast, and the alcohol became clouded with oil droplets.
When I started this project, I found that the recipe for lava lamps is a closely guarded
trade secret. The original lava lamp was made by
Mathmos way back in 1963.
The exact chemicals and proportions are a mystery. After doing a few hours
of online research, I stumbled upon a scant few pages, like
Selfmade Lava Lamps.
I highly recommend that one, although it helps if you read German for
some bits of it. The mineral oil and alcohol recipe I used came from that page, as well
as a few others. Update: Take a look at Mark "Goo" Baker's Oozing Goo page. This site is the place to be if you're into lava lamps, be they new, vintage, or home-made. Be sure to check out the Formulas page. It has another version of the alcohol recipe, as well as other info, including the patented version.
- Go slowly. The densities (or more precisely, the specific gravities) of rubbing alcohol and mineral oil are very close. And your goal will be to bring them even closer. If you pour too quickly, or shake the container, the alcohol will become clouded as mineral oil becomes entrained in it. And it can take days for the tiny oil droplets to settle out again. Heating the lamp does seem to help speed settling, but you'll need to let it cool before tweaking the mixture again.
- Use a smaller, narrower bottle. This container seems to have too little surface area for it's volume, and does not dissipate the heat generated by the lamp quickly enough. The gallon jug tends to overheat after three or four hours. When this happens, the lava flow slows, then completely stops.
- Find a dimmer mechanism. A simple wall plug dimmer, such as you'd use for a table lamp, works fine. These are available from your local hardware or specialty lamp stores. The touch dimmer I used is classy, but the only problem is it tends to turn the lamp on at a random brightness level if power is cut and then restored. That means if the power to your home goes out momentarily, you could come home to find your lava lamp has mysteriously turned itself on. (This is noteworthy for anyone using this kind of dimmer for any purpose.) Since the recipe I used involves placing a gallon of flammable, expansive liquid in a glass container above a heat source, this kind of concerned me. I keep mine unplugged unless I plan on showing it off. I expect a slide-type dimmer and a conventional switch would work just fine. And a dimmer will allow you to easily adjust the activity of lamp, without having to tweak the mixture further.
- If you try the rubbing alcohol/mineral oil mixture, try living with the clear oil and alcohol before you rush out and dye it. In spite of what the webpage above says, anything you add to one seems to eventually bleed into the other, leading to the whole thing being dyed a uniform color. Maybe I just had bad luck in my tests and materials. But at least try a test case before you dump a bunch of dyes and paints into your carefully balanced lava lamp. And the clear oil looks like liquid glass as it catches the light, which is just cool.
- Use some common sense. You're using electricity, flammable chemicals, and hot light bulbs. If you use some of the other recipes mentioned on the Selfmade Lava Lamps page, add poisonous and expensive chemicals to that list. Be careful. Don't set the lamp on anything very flammable (like paper or fabric). Build a good, well ventilated base that doesn't rest the light bulb on the tabletop (my design isn't particularly wonderful in that respect). And under no circumstances operate your new lamp unattended. If your lamp explodes in a ball of fire and the shrapnel kills your dog, don't blame me. You have been warned.
Here's another set of lamps, built several months later. It's a matched set I made using two Magnum 40 malt liquor bottles. The base and cap are brass flower pots. The base has a hole nibbled out of the bottom using a nibbling tool. The lamp is simply a free standing socket with a 40 watt vanity mirror bulb. The pot is upended over it. It's pretty low tech, and possibly unsafe. The top is held in place with poster putty. Again, low tech, but works very well, and allows easy access to the cap for balance work.
The motion actually works very well, for the hour or two that it lasts. As with most
homemade lava lamps, this one stabilizes out after a couple of hours. After months
of tinkering and rebuilding, and trying multiple recipes, I've decided to call it quits!
This is a representative sample of two of my failures. I made 10 globes, all told, during
the spate of attempts at making the matched set. All were made with the same 40 ounce
malt liquor bottles. The shopkeeper down at the local Stop-N-Rob almost certainly thinks
I'm an alcoholic, as they were all bought over the course of about 24 hours.In this case, I used the same oil and alcohol recipe as the first lamp. However, I tried to color the lava with oil paints. I used Hunter Green and Antique Gold. The problem is the pigments used. While it's true that the linseed oil base for the paint is insoluble in water and alcohol, the same can't be said for the pigments. The clear fluid mixture washes the pigments out of the oil quite effectively. This leaves sediment and grit all over the bottom and the sides, as well as washing all but the palest color from the lava. The clear fluid also ends up a paler version of the lava, and semi-opaque. Overall, not a successful venture.