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graphite bricks????

updated fri 21 may 04

 

clennell on thu 11 mar 99

I am in the process of sourcing bricks for our wood kiln and have come up
with a source of new Graphite bricks for next to nothing. I have an
appointment at the refractory plant on Friday. Does anyone know anything
of about this type of brick. All I know is that they are black like a
pencil.
Even if I could use them for the stack (which consumes alot of bricks) it
would be a big cost savings.
I appreciate any info you can pass along.
Cheers,
Tony

Clennell
4545 King Street RR# 1
Beamsville, Ontario Canada L0R 1B0
phone (905) 563-9382
fax (905) 563-9382
e mail clennell@bestnet.org

Gavin Stairs on fri 12 mar 99

At 07:52 AM 3/11/99 EST, you wrote:
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I am in the process of sourcing bricks for our wood kiln and have come up
>with a source of new Graphite bricks for next to nothing. I have an
>appointment at the refractory plant on Friday. Does anyone know anything
>of about this type of brick.

Hi Tony,

They'll stand the heat just fine, but they don't insulate. They're more
like a metal brick in that respect. So they could be used as a liner or
furniture, but you'd need some good IFB or fibre around them for
insulation, I would think.

Gavin

Marc Ward on fri 12 mar 99

Tony, you dog you....

Graphite is considered "nature's best refactory" and has great high temp
tensile strength. It's density, in your case, will most likely be greater than
insulating bricks, so your firing costs will be somewhat higher. Pyrolytic
Graphite will triple in strength once it reaches 2750 C. (Notice, I wrote C,
not F....that's REAL Hot! or about 5000 F). Also, this stuff has a great plus
for you; It has a low neutron-capture cross section so you can use it to
moderate high velocity neutrons in all your nuclear energy applications
:-)....

Marc Ward
Ward Burner Systems
PO Box 333
Dandridge, TN 37725
USA
423.397.2914 voice
423.397.1253 fax
wardburner@aol.com

Jim Cullen on fri 12 mar 99

Make sure those bricks didn't come for a government facility. We use them as
shields against radiation or x-rays in synchrotrons. Chances are those bricks
would never get released to the public but,...one never knows.

Don't use them if they're glowing!!!

Brief piece of history,...Chicago Pile 1, where the first sustained nuclear
chain reaction took place, was a room constructed of GRAPHITE BRICKS. This was
the beginning of the MANHATTAN PROJECT.

Now you know.

You will never be without something to write with!

KEEP CENTERED
CULLEN
Naperville, IL

Don & Isao Morrill on fri 12 mar 99

At 07:52 3/11/99 EST, you wrote:
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I am in the process of sourcing bricks for our wood kiln and have come up
>with a source of new Graphite bricks for next to nothing. I have an
>appointment at the refractory plant on Friday. Does anyone know anything
>of about this type of brick. All I know is that they are black like a
>pencil.
>Even if I could use them for the stack (which consumes alot of bricks) it
>would be a big cost savings.
>I appreciate any info you can pass along.
>Cheers,
>Tony
>
>Clennell
>4545 King Street RR# 1
>Beamsville, Ontario Canada L0R 1B0
>phone (905) 563-9382
>fax (905) 563-9382
>e mail clennell@bestnet.org
>
Tony, While I know little about grafhite bricks,I would be very leery about
their use. Very often such 'bricks' are formed by mixing the graphite with
either oil or starch as binders which burn out in the first firing, with
unpleasant results. Don

Evan Dresel on sat 13 mar 99

Your graphite bricks are an awful lot like a pencil -- pencil leads are
made of graphite which is carbon. Ok, like a large clumbsy pencil.
Graphite is pure carbon which will burn although it will be harder to
light than coal. If they are that cheap, maybe you can use them as
fuel. Won't get much ash, though.

Of course you could use them to build a Chernobyl-style nuclear reactor.
Wonder what cone that would get up to?

-- Evan in W. Richland WA home of nine graphite-block nukes awaiting
decommissioning in about 50 years when they cool down enough.

clennell wrote:
>
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> I am in the process of sourcing bricks for our wood kiln and have come up
> with a source of new Graphite bricks for next to nothing. I have an
> appointment at the refractory plant on Friday. Does anyone know anything
> of about this type of brick. All I know is that they are black like a
> pencil.
> Even if I could use them for the stack (which consumes alot of bricks) it
> would be a big cost savings.
> I appreciate any info you can pass along.
> Cheers,
> Tony
>
> Clennell
> 4545 King Street RR# 1
> Beamsville, Ontario Canada L0R 1B0
> phone (905) 563-9382
> fax (905) 563-9382
> e mail clennell@bestnet.org

orion on sat 13 mar 99

Gavin's right about these not being the best for insulation.

A note on the other post, though -- the one warning about radiation: my
understanding is that the material just slows down (and reflects, somewhat)
radioactive particles. It doesn't "soak up" or "store" radiation, per se.

We sure get into some fas-ci-natin' subject matter here on Clayart, huh?

Happy-happy,

Ellen Baker -- Glacier, WA
orion@telcomplus.net
wondering "....will NCECA be held in Seattle one day???"

Vince Pitelka on sat 13 mar 99

In the past I have taught drawing quite a bit, and I always encouraged my
students to experiment with the wide edge of a woodless pencil (solid
graphite, with a black plastic coating) or to use the broad edge of the
charcoal or conte crayon. This thread got me thinking about the
possibilities using a graphite brick. On REALLY big paper. Wow . . . . .
- Vince

Vince Pitelka - vpitelka@DeKalb.net
Home 615/597-5376, work 615/597-6801, fax 615/597-6803
Appalachian Center for Crafts
Tennessee Technological University
1560 Craft Center Drive, Smithville TN 37166

Evan Dresel on wed 17 mar 99

Not quite right. A nuke can be thought of as a neutron generating
device. A small percentage of the neutrons will be captured by the
carbon atoms (if you are really interested I could look up the neutron
capture cross section which tells you how different isotopes of the
elements compare in their ability to capture neutrons). With one
capture carbon-12 becomes carbon-13. Capture another and you get
carbon-14 which is radioactive. Since there are a lot of carbon atoms
and a lot of neutrons, this builds up to non-trivial levels of radiation
(in spite of the long half-life of carbon-14). Also impurities can
become radioactive through neutron activation (which is also a really
cool way to analyse the composition of a material). Don't know about
accellerators -- what happens depends on a lot of things.

Obligatory clay-related comment: I had a coworker image a slice through
the bottom of one of my bowls using his new x-ray tomography instrument
-- kind of like a CAT scan for pots. I chose a bowl with an s crack
that showed up really well but I was amazed at how uniform (rather
boring) everything else was. If there was any porosity the pores were
really tiny and thus not visible. Science is fun.

-- Evan Dresel in W. Richland WA where the trees are starting to bloom
and lots of ducks & geese are winging overhead.

orion wrote:
>
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Gavin's right about these not being the best for insulation.
>
> A note on the other post, though -- the one warning about radiation: my
> understanding is that the material just slows down (and reflects, somewhat)
> radioactive particles. It doesn't "soak up" or "store" radiation, per se.
>
> We sure get into some fas-ci-natin' subject matter here on Clayart, huh?
>
> Happy-happy,
>
> Ellen Baker -- Glacier, WA
> orion@telcomplus.net
> wondering "....will NCECA be held in Seattle one day???"

Joseph Coniglio on thu 20 may 04


I know about them. I was a factory work at Speer Carbon in Niagara
Falls, New York. At 16 over the summer I bulk stored the components
of these graphite materials in 6 story bins.

Frenchy, a POW with the Germans, me and "Agee" an afro american
and "Sadd" the biker would unload the rail cars and run the material
on underground for a ways out of the rail yard on screw mills that
could take off your leg and onto conveyor belts to the bins.

White gypsum sand from New Mexico was one component.
Coke from "Hard" Coal and...of all things....
Black Mexican Pitchblend with sources of radium in it, was the other
major component.---Any place the powder stayed on your skin it would
burn. We had chemical peels to remove it. Where it settled in hard to
wash places like under finger nails and eyelashes, it glowed under
the UV "black lights" at the bar, where we spent our paychecks.

Graphite was gently baked into many forms in sand casting pits and
was done on weekends when all the workers were home because it
stunk and on monday dig the forms out from the week before so there
was always a warm and cooling supply of forms.

Graphite was used for early nuclear power rods and also big time for
steel mills because it essentially ---Did not burn.

The company lathed 10 meter by one meter rods of the stuff, creating
a little screw tap at the ends, the would get turned into an electrical
socket like a light bulb. Energy was forced though it for electrolysis to
purify steel as well.

Bricks at the time were a small end of the business.



On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 07:52:01 EST, clennell
wrote:

>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I am in the process of sourcing bricks for our wood kiln and have
come up
>with a source of new Graphite bricks for next to nothing. I have an
>appointment at the refractory plant on Friday. Does anyone know
anything
>of about this type of brick. All I know is that they are black like a
>pencil.
>Even if I could use them for the stack (which consumes alot of bricks)
it
>would be a big cost savings.
>I appreciate any info you can pass along.
>Cheers,
>Tony