Where to get Bentonite clay (Home Depot? Target?)

[LM]

I'd like to get a handful of bentonite clay but am unsure where to get it.

Any suggestions?

I tried Home Depot and Target but they didn't have it in my area.

[Jim Elbrecht]

Ebay- Amazon- Google shopping. So it takes a week to get it-- buy some & go to the next project on the to-do list. [if this is for the last project on your to-do list, where are you? I could use some help with mine.]

Jim

[chaniarts]

clumping kitty litter is frequently (but not always) bentonite. this is used in pottery glazes and in bronze foundry work, so a ceramics supply can get it if they don't have it.

what are you using it for?

[TimR]

Try a sand and gravel yard, or major (not big box) building supply.

They sell by the ton but would probably give you a handful.

Well drillers use lots of it, you might try a well driller supply.

[Doug Miller]

Sure they do. The most common brand names are "Cat's Pride" and "Oil-Dri". :-) Any old generic kitty litter will do.

[Doug Miller]

If you need pure bentonite, try a wine making supply store.

For that matter, I have some excess bentonite from winemaking. I'll send it to you for the cost of postage. If you're interested, email me at doug at milmac dot com.

[mm]

Benton?

[Steve Barker]

here's the ones i take:

[Zz Yzx]

Geological formations are commonly named accoriding to nearby geographic names. "Bentonite" is in fact named after Benton SD. There is no clay mineral "bentonite"; the rock term refers to the montmorrilinite clay (predominate) with traces of quartz, &tc.

DAMHIKT.

-Zz

[Steve B]

OMIGAWD! I've poured thousands of pounds of it down a feeder tube into drilling mud. Pallets and pallets of it. It is used in drilling operations, and for lining ponds. Google it, and perhaps you can find a source for small amounts.

I never ever ever realized in my lifetime I would actually see someone trying to find some when we had tons of it laying around. Nasty black slick as snot bentonite.

Steve

[Reed]

Contains "purified bovine bile" ......EEEEEWWWWWWW

[Rudy]

They mine it out of the ground off Hwy 212 (Ho Chi Minh Trail) in South Dakota.

[LM]

For my skin for poison ivy block.

The bentnite apparently adsorbs the invasive oils.

[mm]

I had a friend in NYC who wanted to put a slate floor in the very small bathroom of his co-op. 42 inches x 55 inches with a 2 foot diam. post taking up quite a bit of space in the middle. That's about 14 square feet.

Once in a while when I went to visit my parents in Allentown, Pa., I would drive around and come across Slatington, Pa., where there were lots of pieces of slate lying along the side of the roads. I didn't stop to see how thick they were or if they were anywhere near a constant thickness, or if they could be split if they were too thick.

They fell off of trucks, although maybe if I had looked harder, I could have found some public land where some was at the surface, or a pile of scrap. But even the scraps, while not as big as the pieces most remodelers use, were as big as 4x4" I think. So I suggested we go to Pa. and just gather the stuff up. This was 1976 and he had something like a Cherokee, plus I would have driven my own car home too, full size Pontiac Catalina. This is the kind of project he usually liked**, even though he was a lawyer at an insurance company and expected to earn the the money to buy "new" slate. I think he said something about weighing too much (would it?) and I let it drop because I don't need to go looking for work for myself.

Well, I was only going to write about the slate, but I got carried away:

**He did his own wiring for his co-op, which had been a SoHo printing shop, after reading a book and asking me a couple of questions. It passed inspection, I assume, but he didn't allow for the sheet-rock and one or more toggle switches were covered by a wall plate and all that was in a rectangular hole smaller than the wall plate and as deep as the sheetrock, maybe even a little deeper. The hole was completed with spackle, clearly put on with fingers.

Plus he mounted a 6 foot mirror in the bathroom, probably for some sexual reason, partly on the surface of that post, which wasn't flat and he broke off an 18-inch corner at the bottom.

Then he built his own summer house 2 hours north of NYC, on totally undeveloped land, with no water, electric, gas, or sewer. He paid someone to blast, and he hired one or two guys for a week or two or three, but he did most of the work himself. I think he did pay off an inspector in that case, because he was supposed to have a sewage permit and the rocks were 8 inches below the surface of the ground most places.

He bought two sets of 7 or 8 foot windows to go around the south and west side of the houses, two stories high, and bought them with on-site delivery. He had paid someone to cut down the trees leading to the site and remove the stumps, but it was barely a road, and the trucker who delivered the windows objected at first or something. By driving at 5 mph, I could get half way up in my Catalina. You can go a lot of places with a regular car that people say you need 4-wheel drive for, but not every where, because the ditches got too big at that point so I walked the last half mile.

He had a chemical toilet in the house but tried to get everyone, including girls, to go outside for all their business, so he didn't have to renew the little inside toilet.

All of this stuff was good or at least okay, but there had also been clues that he was, and he later proved himself to be, an incredible jerk in more than one way. For one thing I had to stop bringing any girl I was dating over, because he would make crude remarks to her and then act like it was okay. He asked one about her bowel movements. Another was the girlfriend of my girlfriend who tagged along with us to his Xmas party. She was a beautiful girl, an actress who played pretty girl roles, like Liat in South Pacific. The first time he danced with her he felt her up. She left in the middle of the dance, and I don't blame her. He had no concern for what she or my girlfriend might have thought about me because of that. (I don't think either held it against me.) Maybe he could have gotten somewhere with her if he weren't a jerk.

Maybe early signs of this was another reason I didn't push to gather the slate for his floor.

[mm]

Why do they call it the Ho Chi Minh Trail?

[Ron]

On Mar 19, 3:27=A0am, mm wrote:=A0

WTF does any of the above have to do with home repair?

[mm]

Snipped but restored: "Well, I was only going to write about the slate, but I got carried away:"

I could put a sig that says "When you get bored stop reading" but the sig would be at the bottom anyhow, so it woudln't do you any good.

[mm]

Actually I figured anything about girls and sex would interest a lot of the people here.

[Doug Miller]

I don't know if it's still available or not, but I remember from my teenage years an acne treatment called "Mudd" that did pretty much the same thing.

[Jon Danniken]

I, for one, was thoroughly mesmerized by your tale, especially the part about the South Pacific.

Thanks for that.

Jon