Trying to stick tube to vessel

Hi,

I am wondering how I should go about sticking a piece of soda lime glass tubing to a larger glass vessel,such as large jar or demijon, using a blowtorch (or do i hafta do something else first like drilling to make the hole?) I am also wondering where I should find such a vessel in order to ensure its made of the right sort of stuff..... I tried heating a point on a wine bottle and that sorta fractured when I tapped it. I would ideally like to use a piece of very wide diameter tubing, but that seems to be quite expensive per length... plus I am sure if they have that kind of width for soda lime... I am thinking

15cm plus.... (the wider the better) and several 10s of cms in length, i.e large enough to hold a litre or more. I'm not quite sure at this stage how I would go about forming such a vessel myself. Thanks,

Samantha

Reply to
Samantha BeanHead
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Joining two pieces of glass by fusing them will only work if the glass is nearly the same coefficient of expansion. Randomly-chosen glass is unlikely to be the same COE. After joining them, the entire thing needs to be annealed by heating it to its annealing temperature for the appropriate amount of time. This varies from glass to glass. For ordinary glass, this would probably be something on the order of 950 F for at least an hour. Then it would have to be slowly cooled to avoid thermal shock.

I don't think this is true for borosilicate (e.g., Pyrex) type glass. However, a large Pyrex vessel will probably be expensive. Joining on a tube to a vessel would be cake to a technical (laboratory) glassblower. A university with a chemistry department would be a good place to start looking for such a person.

If the idea is not to fuse them, but just to have a fluid-tight seal, then you can probably work something out with a silicone sealer, possibly with a rubber ring to allow a little play between the vessel and the tube.

It would probably not be too difficult to form the entire thing by hot working, so long as the tube didn't have to be very long or very regular. In that case, you'd probably form the bottle, make a hole in it, and then . . . um . . . I guess I'd have to think about that one for a while. It isn't clear to me how to form a hollow tube that could be joined on the bottle, but a more clever glass blower than me could probably think of several methods.

Can you describe what you're trying to achieve?

Mike Beede

Reply to
Mike Beede

You can't do it with a blowtorch. The glass will crack on heating. If you solve your problems with drilling the hole, you can glue the tube to the bottle. Forming the tube in glass will take a torch.

Reply to
Mike Firth

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