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That’s right — “legal pressure from LucasArts.”

Seriously, what schmucks. They won’t even let people enter Star Wars designs to a competition. If George Lucas is SOO worried about people damaging the reputation and legacy of the Star Wars universe, then his lawyers better whip off a cease-and-desist order to George Lucas. Dated about twenty-five years ago.

So here’s the design that was, with the blurb. It’s called: “Before The Force”

Maybe even Master Yoda was a geek once — passionate about physics, inventing working lightsabers and intrigued by a mysterious “force” that keeps messing up his equations.

This is for you, Stacey.

This is really well done up; the wood shines that perfect honey-golden colour. Don’t even think about the price, though…

A completely un-restored one, complete with tripod AND glass focusing lens on the light, was in the Mitchell Road Auction Centre a few weeks back, in one of the trade stalls in the upstairs section. You can see all the old paint still on the aluminium top part, and the right-hand pic shows the tripod feet with the price tag; $1500, before a polish.

In a furniture shop on Broadway I saw a dirty wooden tripod attached to a busted old telescope that had next to no chance of still working. Mouldy old wood and oxidised metal will still set you back $700 easy. Maybe that’s why I’ve now seen, as of last night’s walk to Central station with Cath…

The NEW evolution. Someone’s done away with the tripod and turned these luscious shiny aluminium lights into desk pieces. I’d bet these bases aren’t what the lights were originally on. They seem odd, but cute; sort of like trophies mounted on pedestals, to proudly display in your study. At the top right behind the fire hose there’s a full-scale monster beauty, on a stand as it should be.

The Lawson Lava. This beauty was commissioned by my wonderful friend Cath in the mountains. It’s been keeping the place warm ever since. That spectacular jar actually came from the Lawson markets one Sunday (keep it a secret, but these are the best markets around.)

These scenes become, in due time, the wonder:

You cannot imagine how bad that stuff tastes. Siphoners, beware.

The Lava Tower

This is one of the first I made: it’s in the photo from the previous post. Still one of the great ones. One day I’d love to make a really giant lava tower…

The Rocket Hulk. These pics show the beginning stage of getting the liquids balanced so they work (left) and then building the base to hold the electricals and support the container.

The base and the liquid together, and the final construction! (CLICK for an enlargement.)

Cosmic.

Lava liquids in action.

So, here’s the recipe.

How to make a lava lamp (the home-cookin way)

The container has to be fairly large for one of these lava lamps. Try about 10 litres at the minimum… Discount stores have massive glass vases for around $30, and they make great containers. It’s already closed at the bottom, so no chance of leakage, and then you just need to find something chemically inert to close the top with. Aluminium is ok, but it will react with the water over time and form that white crusty oxide. Glass is best! Stainless steel is ok, or some sort of plastic that won’t react with ethanol. (NOT perspex! It makes the worst smell in the universe: like sticking your head in one of those nail polish parlours and inhaling deep. TOXic.) I seal them with regular household silicon sealant, and this doesn’t seem to react with anything. There also needs to be an air space at the top, of about five centimetres or so. Air expands and compresses a lot more easily than water; and as the liquids heat up and expand the air at the top absorbs the pressure increase within the sealed container.

Then the base needs to be sturdy and tall enough to hold the light bulb — about 14 cm is usually heaps for a vertical socket, screwed to the bottom, plus the 100W incandescent bulb.

The Liquid

The density of the liquid needs to be only just barely less than the oil. This way as soon as the oil heats up it expands, and thus becomes less dense, and so it is then lighter than the liquid; it floats to the top and then cools down and sinks and the cycle continues.

This method uses methylated spirits (a cheap and easy way to buy ethanol) as the liquid. Because its lighter than water, the oil will actually sink in the metho. The trick is to dilute the ethanol with water, making it slightly heavier, until the oil is just about to float — at this point the oil at the base of the container seems ’springy’ and joyful and bouncy, just ready to leap off the bottom. (This comes later.)

So, start with a few big containers of metho and pour them into the clean container. To dilute it add just a little distilled water and mix them together: say, about half a litre to every 10 litres of metho. At this point the liquid should still be a bit lighter than the oil, so that the oil stays safely on the bottom while you are adjusting the density balances. It’s best to put the liquid in first and then add the oil: the plan is to disturb the oil as little as possible in the entire process, otherwise it’ll break up into lots of small bubbles and will take forever to join up again, if it ever does.

An easy way to tint the liquid is food colouring.

The Lava

This is made of baby oil! Simple! It’s basically mineral oil, which has a specific gravity very close the ethanol so they’re pretty close in density from the start. One addition is vaseline. The oil by itself forms bubbles inside the liquid that float around and bounce off each other in a boring kind of way, and they are slow to join up again when they get to the bottom, and they often don’t stick to the metal coil (later). So a little vaseline, added in a proportion of about 1:5, makes the oil good and sticky. This has to be something to do with surface tension but I don’t really understand how it works. Oh yeah, the vaseline also makes the bubbles themselves more dynamic, less bound to a spherical shape when moving around.

Get an old saucepan and melt the vaseline into the baby oil on low heat, without letting it burn. Then wait for it to completely cool before adding it to the liquid or else it’ll be heated and thus just float to the top and be annoying. Refrigerate it if you’re in a hurry but not so that it solidifies.

Oil and vaseline mix is a really groovy stuff. It’s a mix of two different consistencies, and the oil is suspended into the vaseline so their consistency ends up being somewhere in between, but they still separate out over time. It’s beautiful luscious stuff.

A good way to colour the oil is with candle tint — I get it from Stacks of Wax in Newtown. The tint has to be oil-soluble, and that’s hard to find! Oil paints are made of a powder suspended in oil and that won’t work, as it just sinks to the bottom and looks really crusty and dodgy. I’ve heard that a chopped-up Sharpie marker will work, but when I was doing this they weren’t available in Australia. So I wasted money on a lot of markers, none of which worked… The candle tint comes dissolved in a wax lump, and it does have a whole load of goop in it, and the colour isn’t pure, and some of it dissolves out and colours the liquid itself (because some of the ingredients are water-soluble instead…). Drop a bit of the candle tint into the saucepan of lava and melt it through, remembering that it’s a very intense dye — you don’t need much.

The Coil

There has to be a metal coil at the base too — the lava to sticks to it, making it stay at the bottom and really soak up the heat. Without it the lava quickly reaches an equilibrium in the liquid where it just floats near the bottom without any action at all. This coil needs to be totally rust-free, and I use titanium from a jewellers’ supplier, it’s quite cheap! Coffee plungers from op shops have a coil of exactly the right size and shape attached to the metal sieve of the plunger part, so that’ll show you the rough idea. Ssince they’re stainless steel they might even work, but I’ve never tried one.

The Combining

This is the tricky part. First things first.

It’s a really good idea to test the balances before you charge ahead. Get a glass jar and scoop up the liquid in it. Now, take a tiny bit of the lava mix and drop it into the jar. This’ll let you know where their respective densities are at: if the liquid is too heavy the oil will float; if it’s too light the oil will plummet like a stone to the bottom. If it’s just right the little bubble of oil is going to gracefully and unhurriedly float slowly but surely downwards and then bounce a little at the bottom before coming to rest. Shake the jar and it should leap about then settle again slowly.

Here’s the thing: If you add the oil to the final container and it floats, then you are going to have to lighten the liquid to compensate; this means pouring a batch of lighter liquid through the layer of oil into the metho mix underneath, and the oil is going to break up into a shower of tiny droplets all mixed through the liquid and it’ll take forever to settle out again, and you don’t want that. With the oil safely at the bottom you can very gradually and carefully raise the lightness of the liquid until it’s just right.

What I do is get a large funnel with a tube coming off the bottom that reaches to just above the base of the container. Rest the funnel on the top lip of the container and slowly pour in the lava gloop. Try to match the rate of flow through the tube so there’s a consistent pour without any air bubbles. If it’s going well you’ll see the lava pool at the bottom, but it will be slooshing around and bouncing into the liquid as it keeps coming through.

Now it’s ready to test. Put a light bulb underneath it — either the finished base or some tester device that can support the container with a bulb underneath — and turn it on. These ones take only a few minutes to get some action going, and what you’re looking for is continual movement up and down and through the container. It’s exciting to see it going for the first time.

The Adjusting

Suppose your oil is a little too heavy: it’ll just sit there, and maybe bulge a little when the heat is on, but no movement and no bubbles bouncing around. You need to dilute the ethanol with more distilled water. This has to be done delicately. If you just pour in a glass of water, the heavier liquid will plunge straight to the bottom of the container without mixing and crash into the oil, which is actually lighter than it, so the oil will splash around too, and the water will settle at the bottom with the oil between it and the rest of the ethanol mix — this is the Worst Case Scenario. Good luck getting the two layers of liquid to mix, with the oil in between them.

Thus it’s better to mix up a separate batch of liquid for diluting with. Something like half ethanol and water is good. Then pour it in a small amount at a time, mixing it in with a stirring rod, so that it’s evenly distributed. Make sure you don’t go too far or the oil will lift off the bottom and float at the top. I made a stirrer out of a length of wire twisted into a loop at the end; this also let me lift up a small bubble of oil  so I could see how quickly it sank in the liquid. If your oil drifts down like a feather, it’s just right! You can also use the stirrer to make a small whirlpool effect, and this gets some of the oil to spring up in the centre and again you can observe it’s bubbliness and falling speed.

Once you’ve made the adjustments the best final way to get it all mixed up is to run the lava lamp for a couple of hours! Convection will blend together any layers of slightly lighter liquid anywhere, and after it’s run and cooled down again you’ll find it runs slightly differently the next time it starts up. The chemicals even seem to ‘cook’ together for the first few runs. This means it’s a few days of testing before you’ll know whether it’s ready.

Looking great: the balance is pretty right here.

Gratuitous workshop closeup  

That’s cool, I thought. It’s a really neat perspective on non-dualism, kind of like where the Matrix trilogy ended up, or a lot of Yoga philosophy, or William Blake’s insights into the multiple worlds of liberated and expanded perceptions. Is the world as we know it all a dream? Perhaps. Everything we perceive may be illusion — why not. But in acknowledging the existence of illusion, we also acknowledge it to be a fact, a reality, and a truth of experience.

Instead of saying “this wall is a dream”, which would imply it isn’t really what it seems to be and is not the truth and may even be a harmful deception, this wall speaks a very different angle: it says “this dream is a wall”. In other words it may be a dream, but even so, it still is a wall. If a wall is a dream there must be some higher and more “real” level of existence that contains the dream. But here both kinds of existence are equal. It’s a wall — no mystification of worlds we can’t see and only guess at, because the wall is there and it’s still a dream, but it’s also really a wall.

The main difference, if we believe the slogan,  is that our appreciation of the wall has now a quality of impermanence. And that’s what graffiti art’s all about, after all. Take Mr Bird hat, for example.

There’s so much poise and calm assuredness in that figure; and his poetic phrase stayed in my mind for days. It sounds like some of the early 20C French Surrealists, like the best of Breton or a line from an Appollinaire calligram: “and these rearing clouds go whinnying by a whole universe of auricular towns…” (“It’s Raining”, translated by Edward Lucie-Smith)

And this one I just don’t understand in any way. Is there a story there?

She didn’t. This was back before blogs so internet discussion boards were pretty much The Only Way. Neither of us can remember that acronym now, and I believe the universe is the poorer for it. Which brings me to The Here And Now.

A lot of people seem to be into the idea of a temporary relationship. To express what that attitude seems to embody to me, I humbly present… an acronym:

TUSHIE:

Together
Until
Someone
Hotter’s
Interested
Enough

There’s a point at which ‘I like you’ becomes ‘I like us’.

And further along:

So do vote for it! Then it could even get printed.  

This is on a bin on King St. They did it in biro, by hand, and the note is so incredibly heartfelt it made me want to stop buying battery eggs all over again. Or do something about it beyond a lame consumer boycott. All of which is good.

It must have taken ages. Are there any more of them?

This was growing out of a tree stump so energetically that hardly any tree stump was left. Go on — look at the closeup!! It’s soooo fungusy.