Can Borosilicate be attached to a MASON JAR?
 

Can 4mm Borosilicate Glass Blowing Tubing be attached to a MASON jar?

No lampwork experience here.
Just a beginner.

The goal is to experiment with vacuum tube electronics.

A vacuum sealer machine for food can suck down a mason jar lid and create the vacuum in the jar and then the threaded rim is twisted tight.

The mystery is how to attach wires to electrodes inside the vacuum
so I had this idea to place wires inside borosilicate 4mm tubes and pinch them flat around the wire and then melt them and stick them to the flat bottom of the mason jar.
Perhaps the mason jar should be drilled with a tile hole saw first to accept the 4mm tube.

Stumbling the internet and finding glass tubes readily available on AMAZON
and also mapp gas
and other pencil shaped flame torches and lots of YOUTUBE videos
and beginner lamp work books was very inviting to play with this idea.

and then it got technical.......

Coefficient of Expansion.... COE came into the rules.

So ... what is the COE of mason jar glass?

Can it be fused with borosilcate glass?
With a mapp gas torch?

The reason to use the mason jar and be locked into using the mason jar
glass is because the mason jar is designed to be used in the vacuum machine so I can not get away with any other glass options that do not have the twist
lid configuration unless I pick another glass ... and ....that would mean investing in extremely unique vacuum hardware to be used solely with glass blowing.
I have not found any examples of how to set up that work shop.

Is there a glass forum for that kind of glass work?
Perhaps neon signs use vacuum pumps?

I did a little looking at this some 10 years back and found a video that said the leads through the glass needed to be a particular kind of metal because the expansion of the glass when heated (COE = coefficient of expansion) is different than the expansion of the metal.

Since the two materials don't expand at the same rate they also don't contract at the same rate so it's hard to get a seal tight enough to hold a vacuum.

Then there is the issue of drawing a vacuum on the "tube" while closing the tube.

You could try running the leads through the mason jar lid with the screw ring loose while it is all inside one of the large vacuum jars that come with the food sealer with a good length of wire connected to the leads set inside the vacuum jar while you draw the vacuum down.

You would want extra length of wire so that there wouldn't be any possibility of heating the sealed through access on the mason jar lid.
Once a vacuum is established the lid to jar contact point will hold the vacuum inside until you get the whole out of the containing jar and screw the ring on tight.

It's likely to all be an exercise in frustration this way as I don't see a way to pass leads through the lid in a way that will seal let alone not short out the signal lines.

Keep looking for " making vacuum tubes " videos. I forget where I found it.

Hi KB3BYT,

What type of vacuum do you plan on using?
If using a high vacuum (strong), drilling a mason jar (unless done by a scientific glass blower) would weaken the integrity of the jar & could lead to an implosion!!!

A weak vacuum (generated by most vacuum sealing machine) is much safer.

Get a new mason jar from a scientific supplier, they will say if it is borosilicate glass or soda lime glass. Boro glass can be flame worked with any boro tubing, but soda lime (soft) glass comes in a variety of COE (between about 95 to 104 COE) & unless you have the same type of soft glass, the end produce will crack when cooled.

Suitable metals for sealing with boro are tungsten, molybdenum & fernico alloys.
For soft glass – copper, platinum, nickel & fernichrone alloys.

If you are using a weak vacuum & you can drill the jar (there are several methods – do a google search), I suggest using Araldite with any glass tube (boro or soft) in the hole. Use single core copper wire & Araldite it in the tube.

I don’t want to discourage your entry into lampworking, but what you want to do is advanced. Start by bending glass tubing, then make a ‘T’ join. Look in Google for ‘beginning scientific glass blowing’ for ideas.

Good luck, Peter

My brother bought a LEM MAXVAC PRO 1380 vacuum chamber sealer.
The PDF is online. When I am allowed to supply LINKs I will post it.
I found a video on the web showing how you can stack mason jars in a huge chamber
and suck down the vacuum in a dozen jars at once and the lids would stick to the glass so
I thought the thing to do would be learn how to attach glass tubes to the bottom of tje jar to hold the seal on electrodes.
I contacted the manufacturer and asked how much vacuum it sucks down .......
because nowhere in the PDF does it say
and they did reply and told me it sucks down to 100 kilopascals..... 700 TORR
So
now
tell me
is that a weak vacuum? is that a strong vacuum...... to expect torch worked glass to hold and hold well?

and
yes I understand this is not your average beginner topic
but
it has its purposes to learn and learn right so I poke and pound on the internet and
started collecting tools ,glass, and books.
I landed here after 3 days of searching the web for the answer to this question.... can boro be attached to a mason jar.

I just looked up araldite epoxy.

Definitely looks like a viable option.

Thank you.

Only if the jar is also borosilicate

Can you recommend a specific borosilicate mason jar supplier?

No clue. It was suggested in an earlier post that you look into getting one at a scientific glass supply. I work in soft glass.

No idea what you mean to do but regarding a mapp gas torch- you may be able to manipulate 4mm tubing somewhat but it's not going to budge a larger/thicker boro glass object.

'standard' atmospheric pressure is 760 Torr, the lower the Torr, the stronger the vacuum. 'total' vacuum would in theoretically be 0 Torr, a strong vacuum (I think) is below 100 Torr?700 Torr is a weak vacuum.

I'm in Australia & could only suggest possible suppliers down under (& they would be importing from China or USA?)

Let us know how your experiment goes.

Peter

You may have more luck working with only boro tubing.
Learning to blow out some tubing to a size workable for your experiment would eliminate having to find something to work with the mason jar material.

Unless you are chasing electron beam forming like a classic cathode ray TV tube that is.

Another thought that came to mind was using the glass from one mason jar as a source for the material you want to connect to another mason jar.

Industrial manufacturing of glass objects like drinking glasses, alcohol bottles or mason jars are not going to try to maintain chemical consistency from one batch to another but mason jars in the same case lot are most likely made from the same batch.

This was a very interesting discussion! (Even though most of it is way over my head) I hope it helps the OP with his project. I don't have much to add except a MAPP torch is not hot enough for boro. I bought a rod mixed in with 104 from a destashing sale. It took forever just to melt it enough to make 2 regular length rods out of 1 extra-long rod.

What is a destashing sale?

Nix that... I googled it

so
HOW can you tell the difference between boro and the 104 if it comes from unreliable sourcing?

Here is the idea.... pre melt and crimp air tight the wire in the blue boro tubes then
attache the borrow tubes to the mason jar
and
drill the holes in the mason jar with a tile saw if needed.

Plan B is to simply epoxy glue the tubes into those holes.


http://www.learnmorsecode.com/lampwork/masonjar.jpg

The only way I can tell them apart is the intensity of glow when it's in the flame.

Boro gets a lot closer to white hot than the yellow I get from softer soda glass.

Oh and don't forget that you WILL need welders shade 5 or 6 to work with boro.
A lot of the pipe makers use boro and they often actually get sunburns on their fore arms and face when they work with boro all day.

The safety of your eyes is, like, REALLY important here.
You know how ants turn into smoke when a magnifier focuses the sun on them?
Boro WILL do something very much like that to the back of your eyes in about 20 seconds and leave you with a blind spot right at the center of your vision.
Sun glasses will NOT prevent this and didymium only work effectively with soft glass.

You say tile saw or tile bit. If you mean those spade shaped things, I'd recommend diamond hole bits instead. They have fairly decent ones on amazon, 10 for about $12. And then practice, practice, practice on some sacrificial mason jars. Drilling holes in glass can leave micro fractures that might give you more trouble with the vaccum. Or the araldite could help with that (if you use it to seal the tubes to the jar) but I don't know, never used it.

yes diamond core bits
NEIKO 00823A Diamond Hole Saw | 5-Piece Diamond Drill Bit Set | 5/32 – 1/2-Inch Hollow Core | 1/4-Inch Shank | for Glass, Ceramics, Porcelain, Tile, Granite, Bottles, Pots, and Marble

I bought
Sodium Flare Polycarbonate Clip-on Flip-up Lampworking Glasses
from AMAZON for $76

and then
bought

Glassworking Safety Glasses – BoroView 5.0, Model PCO
at phillips-safety.com


===>>>Oh and don't forget that you WILL need welders shade 5 or 6 to work with boro.