Seeing as a far-flung bunch peruse this group, does anyone know of a UK supplier of lampblack please that will do a 'catering size' rather than the 8oz pots from America? It needs to be the stuff that's soluble in oil.
Once you've done that I'll have the moon, wrapped in ribbon.
What's it for? What quality do you need?
Tried contacting the ICBA?
An excellent source of dry colloidal graphite is locksmith's lubricants. Wet it out with a solvent before you try getting it into the oil, or you'll be there forever!
Then there's Cementone black, which is cheap as chips in bulk and perfectly adequate for most DIY (if not arts) purposes. Most of the cement pigments are iron oxides though rather than pure carbon.
Laser printer / copier toner is another source that's a good black and beautifully fine. Also magnetic and may be moisture sensitive though.
If you want "pure" carbons and furnace blacks, then you've a hard search on. You're either buying artist's tubes the size of nothing, or
40 gallon drumfulls. What you might really need are industrial sample bottles, so be nice to salesmen!Breamhurst up in St Helens are AFAIK the main UK maker of furnace blacks.
The non-oil furnace blacks (bone, ivory, turpentine, naptha) come in from the Far East. I've got some Vietnamese stuff from a mate who does lacquerwork out there, but I think that was made in Cambodia (where people are cheaper and will work in worse conditions than Vietnam).
Aquadag (from Acheson, part of ICI but ridiculously hard to get hold of) might be useful too, but again that's a colloidal graphite. Try an electroplating supplier like Caswell or Canning for it (and good luck!).
Activated charcoal is easy enough to get and you can then ball mill it yourself (search for Lloyd Sponenburgh's guide to DIY ball milling), but it's hard to get this down to size with an acceptable reflectivity. Maybe some grades of charcoal are better than others, but most seem to turn out to be poorly surfaced and near-solid if you grind them small enough.
You can't make lamp black yourself. You can use an acetylene flame to deposit a coating as necessary, but this gets expensive for bulk production. Trying to make it yourself from a hydrocarbon is unfeaibly difficult, as you have to use the alternating two-chamber furnace technique and control inlet air _very_ carefully, or else you burn it off to gas as fast as you deposit it. Probably easy enough if you had to, but I'd build a real electronic control system for it as "tweak and hope" just doesn't do it. Potter's kiln shelves are OK as a deposition surface - they don't mind the heat cycling and they're hard and smooth enough to scrape clean easily.
Some of the firwork pyrochemistry supplier might have it too.
It's for our stained glass department. Thanks for all the info, some handy leads to follow up there.
Lead? Then doesn't everyone use Zebo for that?
Zebrite you mean? If so, they've stopped making it.
I saw some recently with a different brand name on it, one I'd not seen before. It began with Z but damned if I can remember what t was, or where. Perhaps google grate polish.
re lampblack, one source not mentioned yet is a domestic chimney, just scrape. this isnt carbon though, it doesnt conduct. God knows what it is.
NT
Maybe...
Cheers chaps, issue could be (assuming this is the right kind of stuff) quantity, but all suggestions worth running up the flagpole to see if they're saluted.
Same stuff (near enough). I can never remember which was the black & yellow tubes.
Still plenty in stock, and there are other makers of "graphite grate polish".
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